Earlier this month, former Findaway executives Ralph Lazaro and Blake Squires launched InAudio, an independent audiobook distribution platform serving retailers, libraries, publishers, and self-published authors globally from its headquarters in Cleveland.
Squires cofounded Findaway in 2004, helping build the company from its early Playaway device days through its transformation into a digital distribution platform that was acquired by Spotify in 2022. Lazaro served as Findaway's chief digital officer, joining the company from Baker & Taylor. The pair continued to work with Spotify until this month. They launched InAudio after acquiring their audiobook distribution platform that services third-party retailers and libraries, as well as their self-publishing platform Findaway Voices, back from Spotify.
Lazarro, InAudio's CEO, and Squires, the COO, spoke with PW about their strategic vision for InAudio, the evolving audiobook landscape, and why independence matters in an increasingly consolidated market.
Let's start with the basics. Can you explain how InAudio came to be and what exactly you acquired from Spotify?
Lazaro: Sure. To understand InAudio, you need to understand Findaway's journey. I was one of the original founders in 2004, when the total addressable market was about $900 million. Today it's $7 billion. Findaway started with the Playaway format, moving audiobooks from cassette and CD into digital, and eventually became a SaaS platform serving large retailers.
When Spotify acquired Findaway, it was wonderful for the team and great for the industry because it brought another big player into the space. But over the last year, we realized there was an opportunity to take the piece of Findaway that was servicing other retailers—the distribution platform and Findaway Voices self-publishing platform—and make it independent again.
Most of the Findaway team is actually still at Spotify, thriving and working with authors and publishers, but focused on Spotify. What Blake and I acquired was the portion of the business that distributes to third parties like Apple, Google, Barnes & Noble. We still service Spotify too—they're a partner of ours.
Why was independence important?
Lazaro: You can imagine it's a bit awkward when you're part of Spotify, but servicing their competitors. It exists in plenty of tech spaces today, where you have somebody that's like a partner and competitor—we're all frenemies with each other. Hence, the need to be independent.
How do you see your company contributing to the current audiobook ecosystem?
Lazaro: We're sitting at the center of the audiobook world. We have relationship and access to all of the content that's being created, and relationship and access to all the distribution points. What that means is we can create a playing field to help the retailers that are reaching consumers give them opportunities to test and play with things, and collaborate with creators to bring them together to test and try new approaches.
The audiobook market seems to want both very long content, like Joe Rogan's multi-hour podcasts, and very short content, like TikTok. How do you see format evolution playing out?
Squires: Demographics are getting younger. Abridged books went away many years ago, but we think it is time to start thinking about length and format again. All the data points very clearly to shorter form content being relevant to consumers. I think the book industry needs to account for that. Obviously, there'll always be a place for long-form content, but if we want to reach the newer demographic of consumers, it's shorter form content.
Lazaro: The interesting thing is that podcasting is very much a linear experience, and an audiobook is a defined selection from a listener. But should there be some curation? Recommendations have been out for a while, but how can we push to the next level so that people can explore more without having to go offline to do their research on what to listen to?
Spotify claimed to democratize audiobook access. What did you learn from that experience?
Lazaro: One of the interesting data points we learned is that Spotify's entrance to the market was incremental—it did not cannibalize the retailers. All the retailers benefited. Spotify made it really accessible and easy for, maybe, someone who had never tried an audiobook to try one.
I have a personal anecdote I can't help but share. My wife—I worked in audiobooks for 15-plus years, and she never listened to audiobooks. All of a sudden, when we launched on Spotify, she's listening to audiobooks. She had access to audiobooks forever, but when it was sitting on her app right there, sitting next to music and podcasts, she was like, "Oh, let me give it a try."
That proves to me that if you expose people to this format and make it easy for them to access, we get more people to experience it. Our platform handles any model—subscription, à la carte. We can collaborate with retailers and creators to help create unique models that fit what that retailer wants to offer to their consumers.
The content we acquire is multilingual. We've got publishers all over the world, so from a consumption standpoint, we have just about every language you could imagine in our catalog.
Where are the opportunities for growth in audiobooks, which appears to be an increasingly saturated market?
Squires: I still think there's a significant gap between relevant ebook or print book content that's created and audio. We have content that's out there in print or ebook that deserves to be made in audio. Our platform can help get that long tail or unique content into places where it could never be found before.
Lazaro: There's a continued need for more content creation. Think about how hard it was to create a podcast 10 years ago, and how easy that is today. Audiobooks have come along, and there are some interesting platforms out there, but I think there's a role for us to facilitate that even more.
At our core, we're a tech company, but we're also a book company. We love books, we love audiobooks specifically, and we love that art form and the creation of it. But we're also an innovative group of entrepreneurial people that think independently and want to do interesting things in this space.
Squires: At our core, we feel strongly that the creator needs to be protected, and the creator's content is their content. We like a pro-creator platform, creators—especially self-published authors—are built on their independence, and we're built on our own independence.
