This chapter gives an introduction to the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. The book frames audiobook listening as an everyday experience that spurs new reading practices linked to mobile audio listening. Like the printed book the audiobook is a one-to-many medium, distributing standardized content to an anonymous audience. Listening to an audiobook could be described and analyzed as a multisensory experience involving multiple media strategies influenced by aesthetic features and styles. The book investigates the medium from a technological, an aesthetic/perceptual, and a sociological perspective, and discusses a number of basic affordances of the audiobook based on a phenomenological approach to technology, sound, voice, and multisensorial listening. New media reuse and renew old media, and the representation of one medium in another medium is referred to as remediation which is a concept that for the last decade has been agenda-setting in conceptualizing the use of existing media in digital structuring processes.

This chapter explores the audiobook experience as an intersensorial act and poses questions concerning attention, presence, time, and space in the reading situation. It claims that audiobook reading can be both intensified and distracted compared to the experience of reading a printed book. The chapter is designed as a prism where the intersensorial situation is illustrated in terms of a number of theoretical positions namely environment, ambience, multimodal listening, place, atmosphere, and haptic listening. Reading with the eyes and reading with the ears are fundamentally different phenomenological experiences, and this affects the epistemological aspect of listening to an audiobook. Multimodality distances itself from the idea that language plays the central role in communicative interaction and instead regards it as part of a larger multimodal ensemble. Analyzing audiobook reading requires sensitivity toward the given situation as well as its specific components. In this sense the analytic approach benefits from an aesthetic and intersensorial grip.

This chapter discusses on mediatization theory, affordance theory, and postphenomenology and their shared interest in the interrelations between use/behavior and technology/media. Mediatization theory and medium theory both distinguish between two social levels namely the micro- and macrolevels which are described as the two main, interdependent claims of mediatization theory. Mediatization theory is mainly focused on metaprocesses, discussing social and cultural changes related to media in a very broad sense, similar to other metaconcepts such as globalization, individualization, and commercialization. As a result of working with communication through sound the chapter expands the notion of affordances to include not only the 'hardware-based' aspects of media technologies, but also sound as a medium of perception, microfiles, flexibility, mobility, multisensority, intimacy, and the voice as specific and interrelated affordances of the audiobook. The affordances afford certain kinds of use and make audiobook reading more suitable for some situations than for others.

This chapter argues that audiobook publishers have been at the forefront of the digital transformation of the book industry because audiobooks in general are slighted by both the book industry and the general public. It illustrates the development in sales and target/user groups by combining annual surveys from the Audio Publishers Association (APA) of the American market with surveys collected from Danish and Scandinavian publishers, retailers, and libraries. The chapter also argues that the audiobook market is changing extremely quickly these years, especially considering the shift from hard shell CDs to download and streaming. It presents an initiative to reach a new user group for whom reading is not a distinct part of life, and for whom audiobooks subsequently became their primary access to literature. The trucker library shows that there may be many potential new audiobook users out there, who can improve their job satisfaction by focusing their cognitive attention on a narrative while doing monotonous or uninteresting work.

This chapter begins by discussing the audiobook from a media historical perspective related to changing mediatized cultures. From this diachronic perspective it moves on to a synchronic perspective discussing the audiobook as part of a current audiotized digital media culture or, in other words, as part of a mediatized public and private soundscape. It finally discusses the audiobook in relation to radio researcher Kate Lacey's term 'listening publics'. The development of digital media is making audio reading and writing increasingly more common, and not just as a compensatory feature for disabled people. Even though the electronic culture was audible too people believe that digital, mobile media have reinforced the convenience of oral-aural communication, which makes it reasonable to talk about a tertiary digital orality. With the tertiary orality also follows a shift in values toward audio reading and communication. The transformation of written text into sound has historically been described as a decline, compensating for lack of reading skills.

This chapter will primarily address questions of the empirical audiobook reader: Who reads audiobooks? How many read audiobooks? Why do they read and where? What are they reading, and how do they read it? First we will illustrate the development in sales and target/user groups by combining annual surveys from the APA (Audio Publishers Association) of the American market with surveys collected from Danish and Scandinavian publishers, retailers, and libraries. These quantitative surveys will then be supplemented with and developed through qualitative observations based on empirical interviews with four different Danish audiobook users. The role of these interviews is to introduce a more nuanced view on, for instance, why some genres, narrators, and situations are preferred, and why these are more suitable for audiobook reading than others. Since the four interviewees have all been (and still are) steady readers of both printed books and audiobooks, the chapter will end with a case study introducing a completely new user group, truckers, and in continuation hereof we will discuss other potential new audiobook users.

This chapter will begin by discussing the audiobook from a media historical perspective related to changing mediatized cultures. From this diachronic perspective we move on to a synchronic perspective discussing the audiobook as part of a current ‘audiotized’ digital media culture or, in other words, as part of a mediatized public and private soundscape. Finally we will discuss the audiobook in relation to radio researcher Kate Lacey’s term ‘listening publics’ (Lacey 2013), and throughout the chapter our audiobook study will be central to a critical discussion of orality and mediatization.

In this last chapter we will return to the prism through which the investigation of the audiobook has been framed in this volume. We are also picking up and developing two main threads that have been running through the whole book. One of them is the discussion of whether you read an audiobook or listen to it, which also includes discussions of the difference between deep and distracted reading/listening as well as notions of the multimodal experience. The other more implicit interwoven thread is the question of whether the audiobook can be called a book at all, which involves discussions of media definitions, remediation, and the characteristics of the audiobook as medium, use, and experience.