Doing audiobook research: Local voices, national markets, global contexts

This paper addresses doing audiobook research using a digital walkthrough method grounded in platform studies (an interdisciplinary field drawing on business and software studies). Scholars such as Sundén & Tanderup Linkis (2024) have used the walkthrough method to analyze digital reading platforms. The walkthrough method presents a systematic way to explore a platform, site, or software...

Audiobooks are accessed through interconnected platforms and interfaces, generating infrastructural entanglements between stakeholders in the production, circulation and reception of books in audio formats. The nested and interconnected platforms, whether Amazon’s Audible, Overdrive’s Libby, Spotify, Librivox or other services, offer different infrastructural characteristics that influence the...

The rhythms of reading literature via streaming platforms, like music streaming, are systemically structured by the technological configurations of the platforms we use for the activity; however, individually designed by each reader for her specific plans and/or moods.
"Curating reading of literature in a digital age" discusses how reading practices, reading habits, and reading situations...

Why is it that some audiobook narrators' voices work to pull the listener-reader in, while others repel or leave us cold? Voice vibrates through the teller and these vibrations are powerfully felt by the attentive, attuned listener.

As literary studies teachers based in Melbourne/Naarm, we predict that audiobooks will be routinely used for teaching and learning purposes in future....

Regardless of the increasing prevalence of audiobooks in literary culture, many traditional literary scholars appear reluctant to embrace the form. Even within the discipline of digital literary studies, the digital audiobook is often excluded in favour of screen-based visual texts (Murray, 2018; Grigar and O’Sullivan, 2021) despite theoretical resonances between the disciplines, such as the...

Audiobooks have grown in popularity over the past few decades, but this popularity is limited to recreational listenership with little interest from academic scholarship. This gap is especially noticeable in the study of African audiobooks.This paper recognises the exciting possibilities that audiobooks present as a site of critical interrogation and a medium of representing identity through...

‘Audiobook Bibliotherapy: reading for wellbeing as an aspect of audiobook research’

Bibliotherapy, broadly defined as ‘the idea that reading can have a beneficial effect on mental health’ (King, Haslam and Campbell, 2018), has become an established wellbeing practice and the basis of formal programmes in institutions including hospitals, schools, libraries, and prisons (King, Haslam and...

Digital audiobooks pave the way for new forms of reading. Through a smartphone and a couple of headphones, it is possible for the reader to read “on the go” or take part in other activities such as housework, commuting or exercising while consuming audiobooks (Linkis and Pennlert, 2022; Have and Pedersen 2015).Earlier studies have examined the individual reader’s audiobook experiences and...

Audiobooks exercise enormous influence on both the economy and the phenomenology of contemporary literature. As publishers increasingly work to turn texts into recordings, and listeners increasingly read by listening, the nature of the literary event has changed. The ubiquity of the audiobook has given rise to a new set of structures, roles, and reading experiences in the literary field. In...

In recent years, high volumes of streamed audiobooks have been a mark of success of audio literature which thus possibly threaten print books in many countries. In Sweden, the 2024 figures indicated a 33 per cent market share of digital audio streaming. And while the sale statistics provide ample evidence of the popularity pf audio books, there is still little knowledge of readers’ perceptions...

The audiobook’s recent popularity has led to debates in Denmark and Sweden about how the development affects authors. The discussion focuses on the audiobook format but also the model of subscription-based streaming, which dominates the Nordic markets (Berglund and Linkis, 2022), fundamentally changing the way authors get paid for their work (Linkis and Mygind, 2025). I will discuss this...

Until recently, the northern-most audiobook recording studio in England was based in Sheffield, until New Writing North announced Sounds Good Audiobooks which runs on site at Northumbria University. Responding to New Writing North’s important intervention in a South-centric sector, this paper collates data from a questionnaire to audiobook listeners, exploring their responses to northern...

ABSTRACT

Since 2024, the advent of high-quality AI-generated voices – driven by advances in speech synthesis technologies – has sparked widespread public discourse in German newspapers and feuilletons. The potential integration of artificial voices into the audiobook market raises fundamental questions concerning listener perception, notions of authenticity, and the broader cultural...

The audiobook boom has created a new profession: the audiobook performing narrator, with its own forms of popularity and prestige tied to it. There are prizes awarded for best audiobook narration, and publishers are currently standing in line for the narration stars whose voices large groups of readers appreciate.

The rapid technological development is however about to cause the next...

Responding to the rise of synthetic narration in audiobooks, I founded the publishing house nAIrrative Press in 2023: a publisher of AI-written and AI-narrated audiobooks (nairrativepress.com). In this presentation and article, I trace the changing Canadian landscape of AI-narrated audiobooks and its (im)possibilities through the example nAIrrative Press. As a research-creation project,...

When painstakingly pondering the prevailing problematics, perpetuating polemics, and persistently perplexing potentials pertaining to prototypical phenomenon of AI—which seems to have purportedly permeated the very core of the Artworld at large—it could plainly be postulated that one is presently posed with something of a perfidiously potent and perturbing predicament. In place of either...