Thoughts on Audiobooks

Audiobooks are popular. They're the fastest growing segment in books sales. A lot of people consume audiobooks. I use the neutral term "consume" deliberately. Personally, I don't consider listening to someone read a book  to be "reading" as book. Stretching the word reading to cover listening is a bridge too far for me. However, I'm not going to argue with anyone who wants to do so, i.e. whatever. (Or is it 6-7 these days?)

I think there are several important differences between reading with one's eyes and with one's ears that make it a truly different experience.

Now, I'm not an audiobook "reader" for several reasons that I will touch on later. So I have only a very limited exposer to the medium, and what I know about it is mostly second hand. Still I think I can say a few things about audiobooks.

The first thing that strikes me is that just listening to an audiobook, and doing nothing else, seems rare for many audiobook fans. I gather that one of the great benefits of audiobooks is that you don't have to sit down and read the story. You can be multitasking. You can listen to audiobooks while driving, doing chores, grocery shopping, and perhaps even working. You can do it anywhere. This is a plus for busy people, and I think partly explains the popularity of audiobooks. 

Contrast this with reading print books, paper or electronic, where you have to be paying most of your attention to the words. You can have music on in the background, but most of your focus is on the story, not on whatever else you are doing, because you can't be doing much else.

Comprehension aside, I think this difference is significant in that the act of reading in the case of text is primary, and sedentary, while audiobooks are often a secondary experience while doing something else. There seems to be a deliberate ranking of importance. If you don't have the time to sit down and read, you can add "reading" to whatever you are doing while listening to an audiobook. The other activity is the primary activity, with reading just adding value to it. 

Audiobook fans will often cite the narrator as an essential element to their enjoyment of the story. Indeed, it is sometimes the entire reason for picking up the audiobook.  It seems that the more creative reading the narrator can bring to the story, the more voices he or she can do, is one of audiobooks' great draws. Indeed, there are some audiobooks now that have a cast of readers to voice the different characters. Being familiar with the old radio shows you used to see offered on cassette tapes, this sounds familiar. I wonder how they work? In radio, the actors were working from a radio script, but in audiobooks, the voice actors are reading, I presume, from the book, with all the bookish things still intact; from descriptive passages to dialog tags. That would seem, well, awkward to me.

And then there is the fact that most people read faster than the narrator can read out loud.  As a result, many audiobook fans listen to their books at 1.2X to 2X times the natural speed of the narration. Apparently they don't mind listening to Alvin the Chipmunk narrating their books for them. I wonder if they speed through all the great narrators and ensemble casts as well?

As I said above, I'm not a fan of audiobooks for several reasons.

For me, what I enjoy is sitting down in my easy chair and reading a book. I might have music on in the background, but I hardly notice it, and probably don't need it. I guess I have too much time on my hands and so, I have no reason to resort to audiobooks.

I find audiobooks too slow, too tedious, and not being a fan of Alvin as a narrator. I find it is just easier to do it myself.

And then we come to the voice of the narrator. I have a "voice" in my head as I read the book. A very familiar voice. With audiobooks you must accept another voice, and it may not match the voice in your head. I recently sampled the audiobook version of the Emma M Lion books, and while I can't say that I had any particular voice in my head for Emma - I just have one voice - I knew what I was hearing was just wrong. The voice acter, selected out of a hundred candidates by the author, sounded too old and too posh for Emma, the daughter of an Irishman and raised in a cottage. I would've expected a much lighter voice for a twenty year old and with an Irish lilt to it. Perhaps you get used to it, but well... The reality is that any voice acter will likely sound different than you reading voice, and will take getting used to. If you can.

And while I've not heard any of the best narrators audiobook fans rave about, I have to admit that I find the whole idea of creating different voices for different characters to be inherently silly. The whole idea sounds to me like a parlor trick for a kid's birthday party. You just know it's someone distorting their voice, not a real character speaking - a gimmick, a lie. Plus, I think it's entirely unnecessary. I don't think I give characters any distinct "sound" in my imagination. As with Emma M Lion, their individual speech in my head is created by the way the author writes their dialog and thoughts. Nothing more seems to be needed. And I suspect that this is true for those "full cast" audiobooks as well. 

And then there is the fact that with audiobooks, unless you listen to them as you read the words, you are missing all the visual clues that text on the page gives the reader when looking at it. Audiobooks present the story as one big block of words. Yes, there are pauses and stops to break it up. Emotions can be put into words, that may help define the text - though they may not match how you would read the words yourself. (I noticed that as well in those Emma M Lion audiobook samples.) Nevertheless, I know from my own books in audiobook form, that it's sometime hard to decipher where one speaker finishes and the next one begins, so that it can often be, at least briefly, unclear who is say what without a dialog tag. Plus, dialog tags sound awkward when spoken out loud. All this is no problem on the page, what with all the visual clues in the way the sentences are set out and with the use of visible punctuation. Plus, what are your eyes doing while listening to an audiobook? Close them and risk falling asleep, keep them open an risk distractions. Little wonder audiobooks are often an axillary activity.

And for me, there is one last consideration. Given how easily I blank out music - I can't seem to concentrate on a tune for more than a minute, unless I know the words and am following along - I have to wonder how engaging an audiobook would need to be to hold my attention. And how quickly I'd loose concentration and interest in the too slow narration?

Obviously my concerns about audiobooks are not shared by a lot of readers. And I have no issues with people who like reading that way. Especially as a publisher. Audiobooks now account for up to half of my sales. 

But what about you? Do you read audiobooks?