Tantor Media: The Elephant in the Room

You'd have to be trying hard to miss Tantor Media (www.tantor.com) these days. From its scrappy start above a San Clemente, CA, garage to its 2004 move to its current Old Saybrook, CT, location, where it's grown from five to 60 employees in three years, the company has evolved into a leading publisher of unabridged audiobooks in multiple formats—CD, MP3-CD with PDF ebook, Playaway digital, and digital download. In the last year and a half, it's especially gained prominence in the library world, expanding its library sales staff, making regular appearances at library trade shows, and offering flexible buying programs to libraries.

Tantor's proprietary audiobook recording software enables its approximately 45 narrators, including Audie Award winners Simon Vance and Alan Sklar (see Behind the Mike, LJ 11/15/08; LJ 3/1/09) to record books off-site, ostensibly in their very own living rooms, then send them to Tantor's offices for editing. Its on-demand, high-capacity production model (low number of first-copy printings, all manufacturing on-site) also allows it to secure rights to hot titles quickly. After Tantor owners Kevin Colebank (CEO), his wife, Laura (consulting partner), and his brother, Allen (publisher), acquired the rights to Elissa Wall and Lisa Pulitzer's 450-page memoir, Stolen Innocence, for example, they had a 16-hour-long, Renée Raudman-read audio recording on library shelves in two weeks—in time for the author's appearance on 60 Minutes.

Today Tantor produces as many as 50 titles per month. Of the approximately 1000 books on its list, two-thirds are popular nonfiction and one-third is fiction (150 are classics on MP3-CD with accompanying PDF ebooks), though in the last year Tantor has been filling out its fiction stores.

Michael Stanley's A Carrion Death, read by Simon Prebble, and Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramonet's Fidel Castro: My Life, read by Todd McLaren and Patrick Lawlor, were both 2008 LJ Best Audio picks (LJ 1/09), and this year, nine of Tantor's titles were nominated for the Audio Publishers Association's Audie Awards (winners will be announced on May 29), among them Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, read by John Lee, and Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello, read by Karen White.

All in the Packaging

"Tantor was the first major audio publisher that would sell us retail editions instead of the vastly higher-priced library editions," says George Flexman, who orders for the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library. (Free lifetime replacements apply only to the purchase of library editions.) Indeed, a retail-edition Tantor CD (pictured) is approximately $30 cheaper than the library edition, and both are encased in durable vinyl.

Other libraries that purchase Tantor's retail-edition CDs include the Los Angeles Public Library and Baltimore County Public Library (BCPL), Towson, MD. (See Top Circulators, LJ 2/1/09, for BCPL's best-circulating media titles.) "We don't need to repackage the retail edition," BCPL collection development librarian Todd Krueger tells LJ—"the cases are sturdy enough for multiple customer use."

With the American Library Association reporting that consumers today are more likely to get audiobooks from libraries than from retailers, the library market has become for audiobook publishers an increasingly important base to please. Some publishers are just now coming to that realization; Tantor has built itself upon that premise.