The increasing popularity of digital audiobooks significantly affects contemporary reading culture. As noted by Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen and Iben Have (2015), digital audiobooks make it possible to consume literature anywhere and always, through a smartphone and earphones. The audiobook thus fit well into modern everyday life, and digital audiobooks make up one of the fastest growing fields in contemporary publishing. The paper discusses how this development affects modes and concepts of reading while also making it possible to study reading patterns and processes in new ways. We complicate an established idea of audiobooks as promoting more distracted or passive reading than print books, drawing on theories by Lutz Koepnick, and Matthew Rubery. In this context, we also address the concept of distant reading and computer-assisted methods which have been discussed within Digital Humanities. Specifically, we focus on the usage of born-audio texts: that is, literary narratives produced specifically for audio consumption. Focusing on this emerging genre makes it possible to study the influence of the audiobook format on literary texts: their structure and language, as well as on listening patterns: how readers typically listen, for how long, and when they stop listening etc. Thus, we combine the theoretical discussion of audiobook consumption with quantitative analysis of data provided by the audiobook subscription service Storytel on the usage of born-audio narratives. This allows us to examine the effects of the born-audio format on modes of reading, or listening, while we also contribute to the ongoing exploration of how digital methods can be used to study literary consumption.