This paper investigates consumption patterns in digital subscription-based streaming services for books by means of a large-scale dataset derived from Storytel. The aim is twofold: to empirically discuss how book consumption in the commercial top segment diverges between print books and digital streaming platforms, and to conceptually show the usefulness and considerable possibilities with computational approaches for digital publishing studies and contemporary book history. This is accomplished by introducing the concept of the beststreamer, and the average finishing degree measure. The empirical output shows large differences between print bestsellers and digital beststreamers, both in terms of genre distributions, finished streams, and levels of completion. These results are discussed in relation to factors fostering consumption patterns, such as platform design, pricing models, supply, marketing, customer base, and media-specific features of the audiobook.

The paper explores differences between bestsellers in print and the most popular audiobooks in a subscription-based streaming service for books (‘beststreamers’) by means of computational stylistics. The point of departure is the complete set of print bestsellers and digital audiobook beststreamers for the Swedish book market 2015–2019, in total 172 novels. We probed 34 linguistic measures to track differences between subsets at the stylistic level. The results indicate that there are pronounced differences between the formats. 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. The results are replicated when the comparison is restricted to crime fiction, the most prominent genre in the commercial top segment. Given these results, it is argued that it is possible to discern a particular audiobook style as one factor affecting book consumption in digital formats, and conversely that the printed format is associated with other stylistic preferences.

Streaming services for audiobooks and ebooks have grown rapidly in recent years. The shift in consumption patterns has transformed both reading and publishing. One visible change is the attraction and importance of backlist titles. The article investigates how the relationship between frontlist and backlist in the bestseller segment has developed, and discusses the shift in the power balance between the two. By examining large-scale consumer behaviour data (6.23 million streams) from one of the key players in subscription-based digital bookselling – Storytel – we track book consumption both in detail and at a structural level. Our results show that backlist titles are increasingly important for bestselling authors who continue to publish frontlist titles, especially for fiction written in series. Streaming services foster new types of book consumption behaviour thanks to a combination of technology, media, reading habits, and social change.

This article presents a holistic approach to the study of genres in book publishing that includes formal aspects of literary texts, marketing strategies and categorisations used by producers, and perspectives on how these labels are perceived by readers and critics, as well as a temporal and spatial understanding of how genres evolve. The empirical point of departure is the recent boom in Nordic Noir, exemplified by the following three Swedish authors successful in the 21st century: Lars Kepler, Jens Lapidus and Camilla Läckberg. The discourses surrounding Nordic Noir and how these authors and their writing relate and get related to it are used as an example of how book-trade genres operate in multiple and complex ways, and how genres produce effects that move back and forth among creators, producers and consumers. It proposes a twofold model, where genres are understood as constituted by all of the relations between these areas together. Through Kepler, Lapidus and Läckberg, the article shows how Nordic Noir has emerged over the years; how it changes with its publishing context; and how the genre’s internal discrepancy between literary content and marketing and reception is a crucial component in understanding Nordic Noir.

This article deals with the successful Swedish crime writers and the gendered aspects of how they are marketed towards the readers in the 2000s. The purpose is to show how Swedish publishers follow distinct gender patterns in their marketing of crime fiction, and to discuss how this affects the responses to male and female crime novelists in cultural and medial landscapes. The empirical material consists of 153 Swedish crime novels, published in paperback between 1998 and 2011. Theoretically, the article connects to the field of book history insofar as the printed book itself is seen as important when it comes to how literary works are perceived by their readers. The results show that male and female authors of crime fiction in general have been marketed recognizably different in almost all possible ways. In the books’ extra materials and other author-centred peritexts, female authors are associated with the private and the family related. Male authors, on the other hand, are most often described as proficient, well writing and engaged in social criticism. Furthermore, the book covers are clearly gendered: covers by male authors are darker, more serious and more traditional to the crime genre; covers by female authors are brighter, more “fun” and reminiscent of chick lit rather than of traditional crime fiction. The main conclusion is that the gender gap shown in these paperbacks support and maintain the stereotype that male and female authors write different types of crime fiction, with male authors being valued the most. The paratextual division of male and female crime writers, thus, upholds the established and gendered hierarchy in the genre.