Audiobook Studies: The State of the Discipline

The field of audiobook studies has grown substantially in recent years, and now has an increasingly coherent interdisciplinary identity. It draws together conceptual and methodological strands from book history, literary studies, and media studies, as well as education and library research. This article offers an overview of existing research in audiobook studies and proposes five pillars for future scholarship. Pillar 1, “Locations,” considers the audiobook market’s simultaneously local, global, and virtual dynamics. Pillar 2, “Infrastructures,” looks at the infrastructural systems that shape how audiobooks are created, circulated, and read in the form of platforms, institutions, and individuals and the relationships between them. Pillar 3, “(Non-)commerciality,” pays attention to the mixed dynamics of commercial and non-commercial production that characterize audiobooks, including the relationships between audiobooks and talking books produced as accessibility aids. Pillar 4, “Old and new,” analyses how audiobooks are both historical and contemporary media: simultaneously the publishing industry’s next big thing, and somewhat old-fashioned. Pillar 5, “Practical valorization,” engages with the applied and advocacy issues relating to audiobooks’ integration into existing systems of valorization and control, including digitization, preservation, remuneration, and regulation. These pillars are offered as inexhaustive examples of research directions that take audio-books on their own terms as material, intermedial, and post-digital instantiations of the book, and consequently support analysis and understanding of how audiobooks intervene in twenty-first century book culture.