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Abstract

“An Entirely Different Experience”: The Audiobook’s Bond to its Readers

Audiobooks have in recent years become widely popular. The format accordingly impacts how many contemporary readers use and experience literature. The article examines this tendency, departing from Rita Felski’s theoretical conceptualizations of uses of literature (Felski 2008). Felski represents a new attention within literary studies toward the ways in which so-called lay readers use, experience and form attachments (Felski 2020) to literature and art. Drawing on Felski’s work in combination with Lutz Koepnick’s concept of resonant reading (2019), we study how the medial affordances of the audiobook impact uses of literature among empirical Swedish readers. In this way, we combine the theoretical perspective introduced by Felski with an approach informed by literary sociology (Svedjedal, Murray), in order to draw attention to the importance of considering the significance of media and formats in broader discussions about uses of literature. The article is based on a survey of 1400 Swedish audiobook users, which was published during the fall of 2021, in the Facebook-group Snacka om ljudböcker. We focus on a qualitative analysis of answers to the free-text question “Why do you choose to listen to audiobooks?” Our findings demonstrate that the medial affordances of the audiobook, its mobility and the mediation of literature through sound, impact both why and how readers listen to audiobooks: Respondents report among other things that audiobooks make it possible to integrate literature into everyday life, and that, consequently, it adds value to everyday activities, while the format’s mediation though sound, and especially the voice of the performer “adds a dimension” and “deepens” the reading experience. Thus, while the existing debate often associates audiobooks with distracted or passive reading and, in Felski’s terms, with detachment from the surroundings, and from the text, our findings suggest that the format also helps readers form attachments to and through literature.