New Work in Digital Humanities Karl Berglund, "Reading Audio Readers: Book Consumption in the Streaming Age" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Mar 13, 2025
Karl Berglund, Assistant Professor at Uppsala University and author of 'Reading Audio Readers', sheds light on the surge of audiobooks as a modern reading format. He discusses the Nordic audiobook boom and how it contrasts with print and podcasts. Insightful analyses reveal that genre fiction dominates audio, while subscription models impact reading habits and produce shorter, simpler narratives. Berglund also explores listener types—impatient swappers versus dedicated repeaters—and teases future studies on AI-generated voices as sleep aids, highlighting the evolving landscape of reading.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Audiobooks As A New Reading Format
- Audiobook listeners are a distinct kind of reader who mainly consume streamed audio as a reading format.
- Karl Berglund argues scholars and publishers must study audiobook consumption as a major shift in reading culture.
Streaming Data Enables New Reading Research
- Storytel user data enabled analysis at both aggregate and individual hourly levels for a whole year.
- This lets researchers study private everyday reading practices more precisely than print sales data allows.
Genre Fiction Dominates Audio Streams
- Popular audiobook content skews heavily toward genre fiction like crime, romance, and fantasy.
- Prestige literary fiction rarely reaches top streamed lists because audio favors easy-to-follow, forward-moving narratives.
