When you type the word audiobook, do you use “audiobook” or “audio book“? You can tell by my first sentence I use audiobook. It is clear the industry standard is “audiobook”, not “audio book”. The Audio Publishers Association (APA) and AudioFile Magazine both use the word audiobook. Even all the audiobook publishers spell it as one word on their website. So why do I still see it spelled “audio book”?
There are some spell checkers that underline “audiobooks” in red and suggest spelling it “audio books”, even when I type the word audiobooks on my Android phone it automatically breaks it into two separate words. You can even look up the word audiobook in an online dictionary and it will break it up into two separate words and say “Also, audiobook”. I even see it in auto suggest drop downs when typing it into a search like in Apple’s App Store on my iPad mini. I start typing the word audiobooks and it automatically shows me the words “audio books” in the drop down.
June is National Audiobook Month and everywhere I see it advertised it is spelled as one word “Audiobook”. This is what actually prompted me to write this post, given that today is June 3rd and I have been seeing lots of ads about National Audiobook Month. I have never seen it spelled as two words in any of the ads I have seen for National Audiobook Month.
Why does this even matter you ask. Who cares how you spell it, right, wrong. In today’s search boxes are everywhere society, you get different results when you enter it “audiobooks” vs “audio books” in a search box. This is the main reason there should be a standard way of spelling the word audiobooks and it should clearly be “audiobooks”, not “audio books” in my opinion. What do you think?
