Audiobook Stylistics: Comparing print and audio in the bestselling segment
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it