Digital Internet-distributed audiobooks are a surprising game changer in digital publishing. In recent years, audiobooks have moved from being a peripheral by-product of the printed book into the centre of digital publishing and reading, but are typically still ignored in publishing studies. This article raises the voice of the audiobook by giving it a privileged status in the current transformations of book publishing caused by digitization. We present an original model of the digital audiobook circuit, which is based on interviews and knowledge from the Danish market as part of a global industry, which makes it possible to reflect and adjust according to national variations. The model is framed by theoretical discussions of values and dynamics within the digital audiobook circuit in general.
<p>This article addresses cultural changes resulting from the growing number of audiobook users and changes in audiobook use emerging from digital technological developments of the past decade. The sonification of the written text is inscribed in the general transformation and mediatization of the printed book but offers radically different affordances than do visually perceived e-books. New portable digital audio media change the act of reading, moving it towards fields of practice in which reading has not been common before: the gym, the bicycle ride, gardening, resting in the dark, etc. From being a medium typically associated with children, the visually handicapped, or the dyslexic, the audiobook has developed into a popular phenomenon, which, we argue, has as much in common with other kinds of mediated mobile listening practices, like music and radio listening, as it has with the reading of printed books. Taking an inductive approach from the micro-level of the individual’s use, the term <em>affordances</em> will be used as a methodological tool within the concept of mediatization.</p>
Musical experience is often related to an emotional and imaginative engagement of the listener. Discourses of journalistic documentaries relate primarily to inferential knowledge systems in which the uses of background music as a communicative device become an object of epistemological critique. By listening to different voices – primarily from four focus group interviews – the article will discuss attitudes towards musical soundtracks in documentaries, attitudes being negotiated between emotional immersion and critical reflection, with the concept of manipulation as an underlying theme. In the end, the article will argue for the need for an acoustemological approach (Feld, 1996) to study the epistemological potential of sound in audiovisual media.
In this article we wish to introduce and discuss a theoretical framework for a possible conceptualisation of the differences between reading a printed book and listening to an audiobook. We tend to introduce similarities and differences between reading with the eyes and reading with the ears, implying that we should not discuss the audiobook experience as a remediation of the printed book experience only, but as an entirely different experience that could be conceptualised in continuation of mobile listening practises. As a methodological strategy we will emphasise the differences between the literary practices, reading with the eyes and reading with the ears. These different perspectives on reading are used to accentuate the distinct experiences, and future thorough analyses in continuation of this framework would appear much more complex and connected than in the present article.
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