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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.

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This paper presents novel results for word spotting in Latin and Old Swedish medieval manuscripts. A word or grapheme of some kind is marked by a user, and the method automatically finds similar matches in the document. We present a method with improved accuracy for this kind of documents. The method automatically finds pages and lines. An advantage of the new method is that it finds the query within a text line without solving the difficult problem of segmenting a text line into individual words or graphemes. We evaluate the method on two medieval manuscripts and show how it can help a user navigate a text and present graphs of word statistics as a function of page number.