Reading Audio Readers - (Bloomsbury Studies in Digital Cultures) by Karl Berglund

About the Book

Showing how audiobooks affect literary culture, this book provides new insights into reader behaviour, effects of the audiobook boom, and business models for digital publishing and distribution.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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.
James English, John Welsh Centennial Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania, USA

The resulting empirical account of the country that streams the most audiobooks per capita is full of surprises that will make any book historian or media scholar rethink received wisdom generated in the absence of such hard data.
Public Books

This fascinating book collects Berglund's research on streamed audiobook "readership" patterns and influence ... Any library supporting undergraduate or graduate degrees in literature or communications will want to acquire this well-documented and excellently written book.
CHOICE

About the Author

Karl Berglund is Assistant Professor of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden.