Some things to note: All of these titles are significantly more expensive than the $15.42 mean price of the entire Audible catalog. The categories represented are more diverse than we might expect: two science fiction, one fantasy, one thriller, two autobiographical and one self help title. All but one title were released in the past decade. Ready Player One has an enormous number of reviews. In fact, that one title has more reviews than 174,000 other programs combined.

# Which authors have the greatest number of ratings overall?

Stephen King wins for the total number of reviews across his books with more than 600,000 of them. Impressively his title with the greatest number of ratings only has 51,695. His place at the top of the chart here is a testament to how prolific he’s been. He has 130 separate recordings on Audible not screened out by our duplicate search.

In the second plot we consider the average number of reviews per program for authors with more than two titles on Audible (in order to screen ‘one-hit wonders’ and their samples/alternate versions). Andy Weir takes the cake, buoyed by The Martian, which was the number two title overall.

# Which authors have the greatest number of titles and recorded hours?

Continuing to investigate the most prolific authors in our dataset, we look at the total duration of audio and the number of recordings (excluding periodicals). Charles Dickens dominates the total duration battle with nearly 5,000 hours on audible. He and Arthur Conan Doyle, number two, seem to both be benefitting from the many renditions of their works on Audible. A Tale of Two Cities alone has 37 different versions! James Patterson doesn’t enjoy that advantage and wins among contemporary authors.

Slicing the cake slightly differently, Doyle and Dickens swap places for number of recordings on Audible. Arthur Conan Doyle has 706 versions of his works on Audible in total.

# Which narrators have the greatest number of ratings?

The titles Scott Brick has narrated (658 of them!) have racked up the greatest number of ratings by nearly a factor of two. Same as above, we look at the narrators with the greatest ‘impact’ (by number of ratings per work, at least) on the right. Roy Dotrice (with 10 titles) takes the top spot for his work narrating the A Song of Ice and Fire books, the first of which was on our list of the seven titles to break 100,000 ratings.

# Which narrators have the greatest number of hours on Audible?

We see two sides of the same coin — Scott Brick has the greatest output by number of hours, with 658 titles and an average of 12 hours 39 minutes per title. Cathy Dobson wins by number of titles with 1161 at an average of 2 hours 53 minutes each.

# How does the title release date relate to the number of reviews

We can see a spike for each of the 7 outliers above.

While we might expect older titles to benefit from having more time to accumulate ratings, we see the opposite trend. More recent programs have been more likely to garner more reviews.

# How many titles have been released in each quarter since 1996?