Big Brother is Listening: Adapting and Marketing Literary Classics in Audio Format—The Case of Storytel’s 1984

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Abstract The recent popularity of audiobooks has led to new ways of using the format as publishers and producers reproduce and “reactualise” older works by adapting them into audio. The article examines this development, focusing on the case of Storytel’s 2022 audio adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 and the marketing campaign surrounding it, combining a publishing studies approach (Squires 2007; Murray 2018; Thompson 2021) with perspectives from materialist and sociological adaptation studies (Murray 2012) and audio narratology (Mildorf and Kinzel 2016; Bernaerts and Mildorf 2021). The article argues that the marketing campaign related to the 1984 production reflects the streaming service’s strategy of reviving the classic through sound. A paratextual analysis of the marketing material is combined with an analysis of the significance of sound and sound motifs in the adaptation and in the original novel. The article concludes that Storytel uses the audio format to reinterpret and highlight the relevance of the dystopic novel in 2022, while also using the classic to market Storytel as a streaming service in an Orwellian surveillance culture. By thus combining an interest in the textual and medial content of the work and the commercial and social contexts, the article demonstrates how developments in the audiobook industry impacts aesthetics as well as modes of producing, marketing and selling literature.