ABSTRACT
The afterword takes a very brief look at the startup Booktrack and the proprietary technology that the company launched in 2011 to soundtrack e-books. Booktrack’s key innovation, in short, was solving the problem of schizotemporality: the company’s platform could predict the readtime of users and calibrate the runtime of the soundtrack accordingly, synchronizing the experience in a manner that consumers had come to expect from other media forms. Alas, while the company was able to integrate sound and print in an altogether novel fashion, they were ultimately unable to convince leading e-book platforms to adopt their technology. By 2019 the company had forsaken the soundtracked book entirely, pivoting to provide production services to the audiobook industry.
