Recommended Reading—Now With AI-Generated Audio

Yandex Books now reaches over 5.2 million users, driven by a surge in AI-narrated audiobooks that are reshaping Russia’s digital reading habits.

AI Is Driving the Audiobook Boom

To calculate readership for the Yandex Books platform, the company tracks subscribers who either read over 1,800 characters of an e-book or listened to at least two minutes of an audiobook each month. In the past year alone, user numbers have grown by 1.7 million, a spike largely attributed to the growing dominance of the audiobook format, which now accounts for more than half of the catalog.

Of the 250,000 titles available on Yandex Books, more than 120,000 are narrated by artificial intelligence. Human voice recording remains labor-intensive and expensive, making AI a practical solution for scaling up. Yandex reports that 83% of its audience both reads and listens to books, often switching formats with a single tap. The technology significantly reduces the time and cost associated with content production, and users can expect an even broader range of audio titles as the platform evolves.

The Rise of Multiformat Publishing

In 2024, Russia’s digital book market grew 30% year-over-year, reaching a value of 18.9 billion rubles. The LitRes Group—operator of LitRes, MyBook, and LitRes: Samizdat—reported over 20 million monthly users as of June. Its catalog contains more than 1.6 million titles across various formats.

Artificial intelligence has become a vital tool for publishers. It’s used to design covers, narrate books, forecast print runs, and manage pricing strategies. AI is especially helpful for producing audio versions of niche literature that previously went unrecorded due to low demand. This is particularly important for people with disabilities

Ekaterina Kozhanova

Director of Strategic Communications at Eksmo-AST and curator of the Red Square Literary Festival

To attract new readers, LitRes has begun offering webtoons, digital comics optimized for mobile devices. According to Ekaterina Kozhanova, Director of Strategic Communications at the Eksmo-AST publishing group, modern publishing has become inherently multiformat. “Most publishers now release titles simultaneously in print, e-book, and audio. Post-pandemic, simultaneous release has become standard. And when large digital ecosystems like Yandex entered the space 18 months ago, it massively expanded the audience.”

Kozhanova expects increased competition, new synthetic formats, and a broader spectrum of content quality in the near future.

In Search of Realism and Emotion

While AI narration is a game-changer for accessibility—especially for readers with disabilities—it presents challenges for professional narrators and translators. Human voices will likely remain the gold standard for premium and emotionally rich genres like fiction. Some platforms already offer features like switching between male and female voices, further personalizing the user experience.

But the real race is happening at the technical level, where developers are fine-tuning AI to deliver more human-like narration. Companies are pushing beyond robotic intonation to create voices that sound natural, expressive, and emotionally nuanced. This next-generation speech synthesis may soon power not only audiobooks, but also full-fledged audio dramas.