Presented by Carlo Carrenho on January 30, 2026, during the “What’s New? Perspectives from the (Audio) Book Industry” panel at the Shifting Sounds Seminar at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, this lightning talk asks whether the audiobook file might eventually disappear.
The presentation traces recorded audio from Caedmon Records and cassette tapes through CDs, MP3s and Storytel’s pioneering audiobook-streaming model. Each technological transition reduced the importance of the physical carrier and moved audio closer to immediate, on-demand access.
Carrenho revisits Amazon’s introduction of text-to-speech on Kindle in 2009, when publishers argued that listening constituted a separate audiobook right. Today, advances in synthetic speech raise the possibility that platforms may generate spoken versions directly from text without requiring a previously recorded audiobook file.
Current AI narration remains imperfect, particularly for fiction, emotional performance, multiple voices and languages other than English. Nevertheless, its development invites publishers to reconsider how audiobook rights, production and distribution will work when listening can be generated dynamically.
