Digital Audiobooks: New Media, Users, and Experiences [Hardcover]

1. The Digital Audiobook in Between  Part I: Aesthetics, Sound, Senses  2. Modes of Reading as Listening  3. Intersensorial Situations  Part II: Affordance and Voice  4. Affordances of the Digital Audiobook  5. The Performing Voice of the Audiobook  Part III: Usage and Mediatization  6. Empirical Notions of Audiobook Use and Users  7. The Audiobook in a Mediatized Soundscape  8. The Digital Audiobook Revisited

Audiobooks are rapidly gaining popularity with widely accessible digital downloading and streaming services. This book engages with the digital form of audiobooks, framing audiobook listening as both a remediation of literature and an everyday activity that creates new reading experiences that can be compared to listening to music or the radio. Have and Stougaard Pedersen challenge the historical notion that audiobook listening is a compensatory activity or a second-rate reading experience, while seeking to establish a dialogue between sound studies and media studies, comparative literature, aesthetics, and sociology.

This book engages with the digital form of audiobooks, framing audiobook listening as both a remediation of literature and an everyday activity that creates new reading experiences that can be compared to listening to music or the radio.

Have and Pedersen contribute to a much needed rethinking of our concept of reading. As such, their book should be of great value to researchers and teachers within different fields who are interested in understanding mobile media use, literary reception, the multimodality of reading, and the relationship between media technology and user experience.

- Anne-Mette Bech, Albrechtslund Assistant Professor, PlÝ