In a paper published in the Journal of Cultural Analytics, Karl Berglund and Mads Dahllöf of Uppsala University in Sweden compared bestselling print and audiobooks and found marked differences in the top titles in each format. Berglund and Dahllöf analyzed print bestsellers and the most popular digital audiobooks on subscription platforms (“beststreamers”) published in Sweden between 2015 and 2019, a total of 172 novels. They found that “Print bestsellers are longer, syntactically more complex and varied, and seem to focus more on depiction. Beststreaming audiobooks, by contrast, are shorter, more straightforwardly written, and appear to highlight plot and dialogue.” Even […]
