One of the pioneers of the trend is Swedish company BOKiLUR, whose name roughly translates to “book in your phone.” After one year in business, it is providing Swedish audio books to a growing number of people and plans to expand internationally in the near future.

Jonas Tellander, CEO of BOKiLUR, says: “We are currently in the process of licensing English content in order to be able to go into a new market.”

BOKiLUR was launched at the Gothenburg Book Fair in October last year. “Both (cofounder) Jon Hauksson and I are avid audio book users. Jon is a Java programmer and I’ve always wanted to start a business, so we thought this could be an interesting venture,” Tellander says.

BOKiLUR signed its first operator agreement in March this year, with Norway’s Telenor, and today is also collaborating with Telia and Tele2, two of Sweden’s biggest operators. Tellander says the operators have supported the service. “They saw a nice mobile service that brought something completely new to their offerings,” he says, adding that BOKiLUR is currently the first service listed on all three operators’ mobile portals.

The company recently introduced a flat fee allowing subscribers to listen to as much as they want for just SEK 169 per month. “If we can have a couple of thousand paying customers by next year, we’ll break even,” Tellander says.

BOKiLUR’s service is easy to use. You download the BOKiLUR application to your mobile phone by visiting its website, BOKiLUR.se. Once it is downloaded, you open the application to display all the audio-book content available.

Instead of the flat fee, users can download individual audio books, which are typically 10 hours long, for about SEK 150, or SEK 30 per part. “It’s exactly the same audio book you’d buy in a bookstore,” Tellander says. “We don’t produce any content ourselves. We license the content through publishers who share the fee with their authors and narrators.”

The books are streamed to the customer’s mobile, removing the problem of piracy. “We only store five minutes of the book at any given time,” Tellander says. “When you pause the book and close the application, there is nothing left of the book in your phone. Next time you open up the application, you need only to press the play button and after five seconds the book resumes.”

BOKiLUR’s selection ranges from children’s books to humor, but the most popular genres are crime and personal development. Tellander says the readership reflects the book market. “The majority of those who download our books are women,” he says. “We have many customers listening to book after book. We had one guy listening to our audio books for 18 hours in the span of 30 hours. He basically didn’t sleep.”

Tellander says BOKiLUR has become an important part of people’s lives. “When something goes wrong with their application, they want us to fix it straightaway,” he says. “Our service is important to people and that makes it even more important to us.”

BOKiLUR also offers comic strips and, not surprisingly, this service is proving popular among men. “We have developed a comic-strip solution that mimics how you’d read a cartoon magazine in that we sell bundles of 50 strips at the time. Basically, you advance frame by frame by clicking a button on your mobile,” Tellander says. “We have some people who will soon have finished all our 26 albums of Rocky (a Swedish cartoon character), which means our solution really works. Now, we just have to make sure we have more popular cartoons to offer so more people become interested in our service.”

Tellander says BOKiLUR is making the audio book as attractive as paperback books and magazines. “We have created an impulse channel for buying audio books. When you buy an audio book in a bookstore or download an MP3 file from the internet, it’s not an impulse purchase because you have to plan for it.

“Our service gives you an opportunity to purchase a book wherever you are. It may sound like a cliché but it’s really crucial because it places audio books alongside newspapers and magazines, for instance.

“Our job now is to make audio books available everywhere and that means looking at new ways of reaching our audiences. One idea would be to offer audio books in the same format as pre-paid phone cards. You need to find people where they are most likely to make an impulse purchase and make your service available there.” 


Torunn Hansen-Tangen