Is Backlist the New Frontlist?
Large-scale data analysis of bestseller book consumption in streaming services
In: LogosAbstract
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.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
-
Anderson, C., 2006. The Long Tail: Why the future of business is selling less of more (New York: Hyperion).
-
BookNet Canada, 2018. ‘Readers Are Listening: Audiobook use in Canada 2018’.
-
Clark, G. and Phillips, A., 2020. Inside Book Publishing, 6th edn (London: Routledge).
-
Colbjørnsen, T., 2015. ‘The Accidental Avant-Garde: Audiobook technologies and publishing strategies from cassette tapes to online streaming services’, Northern Lights, 13 (1), pp. 83–103.
-
Collins, J., 2013. ‘Fifty Shades of Seriality and E-readers Games’, Academic Quarter, 7, pp. 366–379.
-
Dahlgren, S., 2019. ‘JK Rowling mest lyssnad på Storytel men Laila Brendan visar värdet av långa bokserier’, Boktugg, 2 December.
-
Driscoll, B., 2014. The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and reading in the twenty-first century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
-
English, J. F., 2010. ‘Everywhere and Nowhere: The sociology of literature after “the sociology of literature”’, New Literary History, 41 (2), pp. v–xxiii.
-
English, J. F. and Underwood, T., 2016. ‘Shifting Scales: Between literature and social science’, Modern Language Quarterly, 77 (3), 277–295.
-
Escarpit, R., 1965. La révolution du livre (Paris: UNESCO).
-
Escarpit, R., 1966. The Book Revolution (London: Harrap).
-
Escarpit, R., 1971. Sociology of Literature, 2nd edn (London: Frank Cass).
-
Have, I. and Raaby Jensen, M., 2020, ‘Audio-bingeing: Storytel Originals som produkt av en streaming-kultur’, Passage, 83, pp. 101–117.
-
Have, I. and Stougaard Pedersen, B., 2016. Digital Audiobooks: New media, users, and experiences (New York: Routledge).
-
Have, I. and Stougaard Pedersen, B., 2020. ‘The Audiobook Circuit in Digital Publishing: Voicing the silent revolution’, New Media & Society, 22 (3), pp. 409–428.
-
Helgason, J., Kärrholm, S., and Steiner, A. (eds), 2014. Hype: Bestsellers and literary culture (Lund: Nordic Academic Press).
-
Murray, S., 2018. The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, writing, and selling books in the internet era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
-
Murray, S., 2019. ‘Secret Agents: Algorithmic culture, Goodreads and datafication of the contemporary book world’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 5 December, pp. 1–20.
-
Phillips, A., 2007. ‘How Books Are Positioned in the Market: Reading the cover’, in Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, publishers, designers and the marketing of fiction, ed. N. Moody and N. Matthews, pp. 83–92 (Aldershot: Ashgate).
-
Radway, J., 1986. ‘Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-produced literature and the theoretical, methodological, and political consequences of a metaphor’, Book Research Quarterly, 2, pp. 7–29.
-
Ray Murray, P. and Squires, C., 2013. ‘The Digital Publishing Communications Circuit’, Book 2.0, 1 (2), pp. 3–23.
-
Rowberry, S. P., 2019. ‘The Limits of Big Data for Analyzing Reading’, Participations, 16:1.
-
Squires, C., 2007. Marketing Literature: The making of contemporary writing in England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
-
Statista, 2019. ‘US Book Market: Format market shares 2011–2019’.
-
Steiner, A., 2014. ‘Serendipity, Promotion, and Literature: The contemporary book trade and international megasellers’, Hype: Bestsellers and literary culture, ed. J. Helgason, S. Kärrholm, and A. Steiner, pp. 41–66 (Lund: Nordic Academic Press).
-
Steiner, A., 2015. ‘Selling Books and Digital Files. A comparative study of the sales of books and ebooks in Sweden’, Northern Lights, 13 (1).
-
Steiner, A., 2018. ‘The Global Book: Micropublishing, conglomerate production, and digital market structures’, Publishing Research Quarterly, 34, pp. 118–132.
-
Striphas, T., 2015. ‘Algorithmic Culture’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18 (4–5), pp. 395–412.
-
Sutherland, J., 1981. Bestsellers: Popular fiction of the 1970s (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).
-
Svenska Förläggareföreningen, 2020. ‘Bokförsäljningen ökar stort trots pandemin’, 21 September.
-
Svensk Bokhandel, 2019. ‘Årets viktigaste händelser enligt bokbranschen’, 27 December.
-
Tattersall Wallin, E. and Nolin, J., 2020. ‘Time to Read: Exploring the timespaces of subscription-based audiobooks’, New Media & Society, 22 (3), pp. 470–488.
-
Thompson, J. B., 2010. Merchants of Culture: The publishing business in the twenty-first century (Cambridge: Polity Press).
-
Underwood, T., 2017. ‘A Genealogy of Distant Reading’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2.
-
Wikberg, E., 2020. Bokförsäljningsstatistiken: Helåret 2019 (Stockholm: Svenska Förläggareföreningen).
-
Williams, M., 2020. ‘Spotify’s Move into Audiobooks Is a Seismic Shift in the Publishing Landscape, but the Ripples Will Take Time to Be Felt’, New Publishing Standard, 18 August.
-
Wischenbart, R., 2020. The Digital Consumer Book Barometer: Covid-19 special edition (Vienna: RWCC).
-
Wischenbart, R. and Fleischhacker, M. A., 2019. The Digital Consumer Book Barometer 2019: A report on ebook and audiobook sales in Canada, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands & Spain and English imports (Vienna: RWCC).
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 360 | 282 | 29 |
| Full Text Views | 486 | 263 | 1 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 655 | 446 | 2 |
Is Backlist the New Frontlist?
Large-scale data analysis of bestseller book consumption in streaming services
In: LogosAbstract
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.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 360 | 282 | 29 |
| Full Text Views | 486 | 263 | 1 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 655 | 446 | 2 |