Reading Audio Readers: Book Consumption in the Streaming Age
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Overview
The first computational study of reading to focus on audiobooks, this book uses a unique and substantial set of reader consumption data to show how audiobooks and digital streaming platforms affect our literary culture. Offering an academic perspective on the kind of user data hoard we associate with tech companies, it asks: when it comes to audiobooks, what do people really read, and how and when do they read it?
Tracking hundreds of thousands of readers on the level per user and hour, Reading Audio Readers combines computational methods from cultural analytics with theoretical perspectives from book history, publishing studies, and media studies. In doing so, it provides new insights into reading practices in digital platforms, the effects of the audiobook boom, and the business-models for book publishing and distribution in the age of streamed audio.
Showing how audiobooks and digital streaming platforms affect our literary culture, this book offers an academic perspective on a unique and substantial dataset of reader consumption data, providing new insights into reader behaviour onn digital platforms, the effects of the audiobook boom, and the business-models for book publishing and distribution based on streaming and subscription.
This book is the first computational study of readers and reading to focus on audiobooks
Reveals a major shift in reading practices during the twenty-first century towards a hugely popular form of entertainment combining audiobooks and digital streaming services
This book is the first study of audiobooks that is based on the big data of audio consumption
This book is is the first study of contemporary reading habits that centers on the subscription-based streaming model as opposed to individual book purchasing
List of figures
List of tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Audiobook reading on digital display
1. Understanding book streaming services
2. Bestsellers and beststreamers: Genre reading
3. The re-emergence of the old: Backlist and frontlist reading
4. Voices leading the streams? Narrated reading
5. The reading hours of the day and night: Temporal reading
6. Repeaters, swappers and constant readers: Expanded reading
Conclusion: Listen up to the reading data
References
Index
Berglund has managed to gain access to the kind of industry data other researchers only dream about. His study of audiobook listeners and subscription streaming in Sweden explodes some of our most deeply entrenched assumptions about how, when, and what people read.
How can the users of Storytel transform our ideas about reading, books, and bookselling? Anyone who cares about what readers do, and how publishing is changing because of audiobooks should read this compelling and uniquely researched book.
- Title: Reading Audio Readers: Book Consumption in the Streaming Age
- Author: Karl Berglund
- Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Digital Cultures
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2024
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 208
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781350358386, 9781350358362, 1350358363, 135035838X
- Resource ID: LLS:9781350358386
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T10:51:19Z
Karl Berglund is Assistant Professor of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden.