ABSTRACT
This chapter will primarily address questions of the empirical audiobook reader: Who reads audiobooks? How many read audiobooks? Why do they read and where? What are they reading, and how do they read it? First we will illustrate the development in sales and target/user groups by combining annual surveys from the APA (Audio Publishers Association) of the American market with surveys collected from Danish and Scandinavian publishers, retailers, and libraries. These quantitative surveys will then be supplemented with and developed through qualitative observations based on empirical interviews with four different Danish audiobook users. The role of these interviews is to introduce a more nuanced view on, for instance, why some genres, narrators, and situations are preferred, and why these are more suitable for audiobook reading than others. Since the four interviewees have all been (and still are) steady readers of both printed books and audiobooks, the chapter will end with a case study introducing a completely new user group, truckers, and in continuation hereof we will discuss other potential new audiobook users.
