In 2022, we launched Voxblock at the Edinburgh Book Festival. We arrived with a stand, a handful of players and a lot of hope that families would want a different way for their children to listen to stories.
This year, we are going back. From 15 August, Voxblock will be sold at the Waterstones shop on the festival site, this time not from our own stand but on the shelves of a bookseller we have long admired.
It is a strange and lovely thing to return somewhere four years on and see how much has changed. Back then, Voxblock was an idea we believed in and not much else. Now, families across the UK and Australia are building their own audiobook libraries, block by block, and we have grown from a stand at one festival to a partnership with one of the UK's best-loved bookshops, at the very same event.
The festival shop will stock titles from authors appearing at this year's events, including Julia Donaldson, A.F. Steadman, Anna James, Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara and Louie Stowell. There is something fitting about our physical audiobooks sitting on the same shelves as the text books, and about children being able to choose either, or both, in the same afternoon.
Our mission is to improve literacy through audio, giving children a way into stories and ideas that does not depend on a screen, or on being able to sit down and read a page. That mission guides every decision we make, from the audiobooks we choose to the retailers we work with.
Literacy is about far more than reading a page. It is about understanding concepts and themes, following an argument, and making sense of a world that increasingly depends on it, particularly for children who do not always engage with text straightaway. Audio has a genuine role to play in that.
National Literacy Trust research published in 2026, based on responses from over 110,000 children and young people, found that 47.3% now listen to audiobooks, podcasts or both, and more than a quarter say listening to audio sparks their interest in reading books. That is the world we built Voxblock for.
Voxblock has been sold through independent bookshops since 2025, and that relationship remains as important to us as it has always been. Waterstones now joins those independent shops as a new part of how families can find Voxblock, and they have been generous and thoughtful in how they have welcomed us in. We could not have asked for a better place to mark this next step than the festival where the whole thing started.
If you are at the Edinburgh Book Festival this year, do come and find us on the Waterstones shelves. We would love to see you there.
