Platformed audio fiction: How streaming and audiobook imaginaries transform contemporary publishing in Sweden

The article examines how the audiobook’s increasing centrality on the contemporary book market influences publishing strategies. Departing from the case of Sweden, where audiobooks are primarily distributed via subscription-based streaming services, the article is based on interviews with 12 Swedish publishers and streaming service representatives. Thus, it contributes with a producer perspective to existing research in audiobooks, which is mostly centred on the consumption aspect and what audiobooks do to reading and uses of literature. Analysing interview results through the theoretical lens of platformization, the article shows how the publishers’ ideas and strategies related to audiobooks, what we call ‘audiobook imaginaries’, are connected to streaming platform imaginaries. Rather than producing texts ‘for sound’, publishers strategically focus on texts that are expected to perform well on the streaming platforms, resulting in preferences for serial fiction and in publishing strategies inspired by other streaming media. The article finally discusses how the audiobook boom pushes parts of the Scandinavian publishing industry towards cross-industry logics of streaming and platformization, resulting in an imagined fragmentation of the book market, as audiobooks and printed books are understood to exist in two different spheres that include different genres sold in different spaces, to (partly) different audiences.