Remember when audiobooks first came out? Actually, considering that the format was first proffered at schools, public libraries, and music shops in the 1930s, there may not be too many people who can say they were around for that technological breakthrough. It was an initiative that started out as a means of enabling visually impaired people to enjoy books.
However, there are probably quite a few who remember being driven to school, the shops, or taking a holiday trip with the family when one of their parents niftily slotted a cassette into the car tape player and were kept engrossed and, no doubt, quiet while listening to someone with suitably trained dulcet tones narrating a novel.
If that is your abiding sensorial memory of imbibing literary works, then cinematic books will introduce you to a whole new dimension of the listening experience. And while many a bibliophile has taken advantage of digital book formats, such as Kindle, what Yael Yekutiel and Gil Geva are offering takes book consumption into a whole new arena.
The origin of Canarit Audiobooks
Like so many current leading-edge enterprises, Canarit Audiobooks was spawned by diversity or, at least, challenging circumstances. “We basically met because of COVID,” says Yekutiel about her confluence with Geva. “I come from the field of taking content, creative or informative content, and employing very advanced technologies to generate new avenues of income. Gil comes from the purely creative side,” she explains.
It wasn’t just professional domains that initially set the two apart. “Gil lives in Los Angeles and, at the time, I lived in New York. Someone brought us together after telling me about Gil’s idea for Canarit. It was her idea. Someone who had worked with me in New York said: ‘Listen, there is someone who has a very creative idea to do with audiobooks what directors and producers do with movies, but she doesn’t really know what to do with it.’”
Cue Yekutiel. “I come from a background of taking all kinds of creative concepts and seeing whether they can have a viable presence in the market, and turning them into a product, how much to sell them for, and to develop a market for them.”
The two entrepreneurs interfaced under existential duress. “We met, at the start of the coronavirus epidemic, at the only café that was still open in Tel Aviv,” Yekutiel recalls. “We met behind closed shutters. They used to have the blinds down and didn’t turn the air conditioning on,” she laughs.
The two clicked from the off. “We sat and talked for four hours. And we said: ‘We’re doing it. We’re going to make this happen.’” And so Canarit began to gestate.
THE PAIR brought many of the requisite skills and plenty of the necessary professional backdrop to the groundbreaking fray. Geva’s creative direction and sound production bio included stints with Disney and working on the sound team of the 2016 Oscar-nominated dramatic film Deepwater Horizon.
Meanwhile, Yekutiel had sparred with a slew of hi-tech giants such as Apple, IBM, and Oracle, and developed content formats and digital content monetization for Warner Bros., NBS, Oprah Winfrey, and Nike. Clearly, if anyone was going to turn a bright idea for taking literary entertainment to the next sensory level, it was Geva and Yekutiel.
They duly got down and dirty, and headed for uncharted waters with gusto. They were going to spread their proactive wings and offer the public a new way of enjoying books and, in the process, up our story-time ante a notch or two.
“It was clear to us that we were going to work in English, in the American market. Initially we didn’t think beyond the American market. We thought the coronavirus period would end and we’d be back in Los Angeles and New York within a couple of weeks, and we’d commute between the two cities, and we’d get on with the new project. That didn’t happen,” Yekutiel chuckles.
But where there’s a will, there’s a way, especially with contemporary means of communication at hand. “We set up the company, and we conducted most of our business via Zoom and email.” Things got going, regardless of lockdowns and other pandemic-related irritants. “For the first three years, we worked almost exclusively with the US market and a little in the British market,” Yekutiel recounts.
The oeuvre swelled. “We produced close to 50 titles of cinematic audiobooks in English. [Jane Austen classic] Pride and Prejudice is one of our biggest productions. There are almost 12 listening hours, with a cast of actors. Gil directs most of our productions, and she directed this one with great delicacy and sensitivity.”
The pair made sure they had all the entertaining bases covered. “The whole production is accompanied by original music that was written for us by [Los Angeles-based Israeli composer] Sharon Farber. She won a Grammy, and she wrote the music for Pride and Prejudice. There is music and effects throughout the [audio]book.”
This was a big deal. “We auditioned actors from all over the United States. We did rehearsals by Zoom. That is commonplace these days. Essentially, if you have the basic setup for recording, you don’t have to leave your house,” she says.
With the logistical arrangements in place, Canarit took on corporeal, as well as virtual, form. “In the end, things just worked out,” Yekutiel smiles.
IT SEEMS the two entrepreneurs were happy to go with the flow, eventually coming home to roost. “We also started working in Israel with Israeli writers. That wasn’t planned. But we started here in Hebrew. Up to that point, all our business had been in English. After a year, it developed into the UK.”
That, naturally, necessitated a change of technical tack on the audio front. Yekutiel says that is part and parcel of Canarit’s professional ethos. “We have actors all over the world – in the US, Canada, the UK. We have actors doing London accents, upper crust, whatever you want, whatever suits the content.”
Geva and Yekutiel do, however, allow themselves a little artistic elbow room. “We did a production of [Oscar Wilde’s comedy] The Importance of Being Earnest. Of course, everyone had a British accent. But we took some liberties because we like to take some creative license. For example, instead of having a male narrator, we had an actress in that role.” The audiobook is currently in the latter stages of the editing phase.
This is clearly not a copy-paste replica of the original. “We decided not to go for standard music from the era. We included some disco music,” Yekutiel notes. Then again, there are liberties and there are liberties, and the end product does not stray too far from the author’s original intent.
“We are very faithful to the books, to the literary source,” Yekutiel stresses. “It is only in cases when, for example, there are too many ‘he saids,’ ‘she saids.’ We want to convey the book as the author intended and enhance the experience, but you have to have the odd adaptation.”
Canarit has built up quite a stable over the past four or five years. “The Masque of the Red Death,” a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, is in there, as well as several short stories by his contemporaries Kate Chopin and O. Henry (aka William Sydney Porter). Acclaimed narrator Caitlin Kelly’s services have also been secured.
Things are proceeding full steam ahead. “We are currently working on 10 different productions,” says Yekutiel. “Some are in English and some in Hebrew, part of them for publishers and others for writers.” Canarit may have global designs, but there is a home-based, not to say patriotism-infused, sentiment in the works, too.
“Three of them are particularly interesting. We are producing them in English. The writer is an Israeli living in Finland. Her name is Nica [Yoffe], and she is very successful in Israel as a fantasy writer. Whenever there is a Book Week event, you can tell which is her stall because she has the longest lines. Young girls and teenagers come with their parents or on their own. Some [purchasers] are over 30.”
Production of the three Nica titles is due to be completed within six or seven months and will thereafter be available on major online platforms such as Audible, Spotify, and Storytel.
Needless to say, Nica’s output is getting the full Canarit treatment. Yekutiel says that feeds off current market demand. “I learned about her because anyone who likes fantasy books, dark fantasy, or romantic works – that’s the biggest trend in the world today – likes Nica. Romantic fantasy is the biggest selling genre.”
IT ALSO suited the company’s credo. “In Canarit, we have three lines of business,” Yekutiel explains. “The first one is we are a publisher. We purchase the rights of books, and then we produce them as audiobooks, and we distribute them through all the networks, and we take care of the marketing and sales,” she explains.
Canarit also proffers the benefit of its professional expertise and experience to others. “We are a production house for hire. We specialize in producing cinematic, multi-cast audiobooks. That means a full cast of actors. Our books are not narrated. The actors perform them. We direct the actors, and after we record everything, we add effects and music, sometimes original music.”
The accent is very much on quality and on providing the listener with the best possible entertainment end product. “We take music from various libraries that all the big Hollywood studios work with. We produce everything in 3D. We do that so that anyone who listens to the books gets a cinematic experience, as if you are sitting in movie theater and you hear the movie happen around you. You hear the whoosh of the dragon above your head, and you hear someone calling you from behind. In English, they also call our books ‘immersive audiobooks’ because you are immersed in the story,” she says.
In addition, Canarit helps writers get out to wider readership hinterlands. “We are also an agency because we work with most of the big publishers worldwide. That’s mostly because of my previous career. I have a good relationship with Netflix and Disney and Warner Bros., and some television networks.”
It is a two-way street. “We also help our authors sell the rights of their books in different languages, or to sell the rights for movies or TV.” Sounds like a win-win arrangement for all concerned – Canarit, the creators, and the consumers.
I wondered where the majority of audiobook users listen in. “We did a survey, and we discovered that most listen while driving or at the gym, on the treadmill, and that sort of thing. A lot of people say it is while they do household chores like washing the dishes or doing the laundry,” Yekutiel reports.
User-friendly technology also comes into play here. “Most people now have wireless earbuds; it’s a lot easier. And many people’s smartphones are synchronized with their car audio system, so that doesn’t require a lot of effort. It’s pretty natural [for them to listen to books en route].”
The jury is probably still out on whether this is a bona fide revolution, a game changer in the field of literary consumption. However, the figures and forecasts do tell a pretty convincing tale.
“The global audiobooks market is enormous,” says Yekutiel. “It is predicted that by 2030, the world market will be worth over $18 billion. Naturally, most of that will be in the English-speaking sector. But one of the major developing markets, the second fastest-growing market, is the Scandinavian market. That was a surprise.”
There is, it must be said, the important traditional factor of readers using their imagination to bring the written plot to life, and engaging their senses, unaided by advanced technological shortcuts, but the idea of cinematic audiobooks, particularly at this stage of human evolution, sounds like a fascinating prospect.