Good news for customers who like to simultaneously read and listen to their books: immersion reading is now available in the Audible app. Says Gabriela Llerena, a Product Manager at Audible, "Immersion reading offers book lovers the best of both worlds. Whether you're learning a new language, studying for an exam, or immersed in a story, you no longer have to choose one format over the other."

This ambitious product launch was among many firsts for Gabriela. Born in Peru, she spent 12 years consulting for global companies before coming to the U.S. to pursue a master’s degree at NYU. In 2023 she joined us as the first intern in Audible’s Product Management Internship Program, converting to a full-time PM the following year. Audible was her first U.S. job, her first English‑language company, and her first product management role. “My first everything,” she laughs.

Coordinating across multiple Amazon and Audible teams, Gabriela ensured everyone understood the customer problem and requirements at every step of development. One major requirement was designing an experience that honored accessibility needs and user preferences, and felt native to Audible’s app, all while being able to globally across devices and marketplaces. That’s where our Senior User Experience Designer, Michael Andrews, came in.

Before joining Audible, Michael spent most of his career in UX, moving from development to art direction to UX design for some of the biggest global media and entertainment companies. He joined Audible in 2022, and helped to build the experience that lets customers add Audible audiobooks to their Amazon cart.

For immersion reading, Michael’s role was to define “how the experience would feel and function,” he says, “and then get a set of parameters together for how we feel people would use this.”

That meant obsessing over details that most listeners might notice only subconsciously: type size, line spacing, font choices, and how the words move on the screen as the narrator speaks. From the start, accessibility was a non‑negotiable. “We give immersion readers three fonts to select from: a serif, a sans serif, and the OpenDyslexic font, which has unique markings to help you read more easily and quickly,” Michael explains.

The team also had to decide: show the text as pages or scrolling? “When you have a document that’s hundreds of pages long, it’s very difficult to find your place in a scroll,” says Michael. “The way our eyes work is by jumping between points. You don’t move smoothly. But turning pages gives your eyes the ability to focus on one point and then move across.”

The final design, a paginated, word‑by‑word highlighting, actually mirrors how many people first learn to read: someone tracing a finger along the page as the words are spoken aloud. Michael also partnered closely with both Kindle’s and Audible’s accessibility designers and product teams to ensure immersion reading would work not only for sighted users, but also for customers using screen readers and alternative navigation.

Immersion reading is one of Audible’s multiformat offerings that allow users to switch seamlessly between listening and reading, or do both simultaneously on the Audible app. Michael notes that our tech team’s culture of careful and thorough documentation allowed him to “see at a thousand‑foot level” which parts of immersion reading could inform the building and evolution of other multiformat features, and vice versa.

As PM, Gabriela orchestrated a complex network of collaborators: Amazon’s Kindle Core Apps and Kindle for Web product and engineering teams, Audible’s own publishing relationship teams, customer service teams trained ahead of launch to handle questions, and a go‑to‑market team that ran one of Audible’s boldest feature launches yet.

Immersion reading launched with 800,000+ titles in the U.S., UK, Germany and Australia. Data already shows that Immersion Reading customers tend to listen at higher speeds and ninety-four percent more often than audio-only users. They also tend to complete more titles than audio‑only listeners. In addition to helping dyslexic readers enjoy more books, immersion reading helps with attention issues, language-learning, and getting through ever-lengthening reading lists. Gabriela says, “With immersion reading, customers are reading twice the number of titles than audio‑only customers.”

Families and younger listeners are an especially promising part of the future of immersion reading. Research shows that kids learn to read more easily when they hear words and see them at the same time, and that this approach can boost reading skills and improve focus. "Kids like having something to look at, and pairing audio with text supports reading development in a way other offerings don't,” says Gabriela.

For Gabriela, who grew up loving Latin American authors and now helps bring their work to listeners worldwide, and for Michael, who delights in solving problems, launching new ways to enjoy multi‑format storytelling — with care for accessibility, culture and craft — is meaningful work that’s genuinely good for the world.

Michael says, “I’ve seen videos of people saying, ‘This is amazing. This is helping me to read more. This is helping me comprehend things.’”

Gabriela emphasizes that was the response the team hoped for, and it’s what drove their fast and dedicated work. “When you are obsessed with a customer struggle, and you see how to reduce that gap, the roadmap becomes so easy.”

See open Product & Customer Experience roles at Audible