The history of anime and light novels is full of experimentation. Over the years, creators have forged new styles, techniques and genres. The history of both anime and light novels is also full of attempts to find new mediums. From the early days of magazines and simple TV animation, studios have been looking for new ways to reach their audience. From the move to home formats to modern digital and streaming services, the industry never stops moving -- and now, many popular anime and light novels are making the jump to audiobooks.
Audiobooks have been going through a renaissance in recent years thanks to smartphones and platforms like Audible. The first audiobooks were released in the 1930s, but these mostly acted as a resource for the blind, as until recently, audiobooks have always had format issues. Record-based audiobooks required massive amounts of discs per book, and even when cassettes became popular in the 1980s, longer books needed eight to nine tapes to contain the entire story. However, as technology improved, accessing audiobooks became simpler. Now, listeners can simply stream them to their phones, giving them access to a massive library of stories on a device people generally always have on hand anyway.
Currently, several major anime series and light novels have English-language audiobooks. This includes Bakemonogatari, a story about a boy dealing with various supernatural girls, and the first volume of Aneko Yusagi's popular isekai series The Rising of the Shield Hero, among many others. Some even pull in talent from their respective anime, such as the audiobook version of the Sword Art Online 1: Aincrad light novel, which has Kirigaya Kazuto's English dub voice actor, Bryce Papenbrook, handling the narration.
The audiobook medium is fantastic for anime and light novels for many reasons. One reason is accessibility, as audiobooks are easy to enjoy while doing other things, allowing people with limited reading time to enjoy them. Thanks to modern digital platforms, they're also easy to distribute, as the publisher doesn't need to worry about creating and shipping physical copies. It can simply upload the books to a digital storefront, allowing everyone to access them. This reduces overheads, making it a cost-effective solution for series with smaller fanbases, especially those that can't support the costs associated with a novel print run or an anime season.
Audiobooks are also a fun and immersive experience. Even the most basic single-narrator audiobooks can quickly and easily immerse the listener into the story's world. However, audiobooks can go beyond that, going from a single narrator to the full-cast format. Full-cast audiobooks are basically audio plays that feature several actors providing character voices, along with thematic music and sound effects. These are perfect for anime and light novels, delivering a gripping and immersive experience that can totally pull the listener into the story.
Moreover, many anime and light novels feature events or spaces that are beyond our physical reality. While animation can help visualize the impossible, nothing can compare to the human imagination. So, for surreal and supernatural titles, the narrated audiobook format allows listeners to imagine these environments and events however they want, making the locations and scenes more impactful as a result.
It should be noted that while the audiobook format is new, the anime and light novel mediums are no strangers to audio dramas. In fact, many major series release drama CDs with music and original audio plays featuring the voice actors from the series. In many ways, this is therefore simply the natural extension of this concept, just with the resulting dramas getting localized -- something that rarely (if ever) happens with drama CDs.
As time moves on, new and exciting mediums will be created -- and whenever there a new medium is brought to the mainstream, we can expect anime and light novel publishers to find ways to use them to the best of their ability. Hopefully, these audiobooks catch on, bringing with them a wave of new and accessible audio content featuring our favorite characters and worlds.