I tried an audio book and the slow speed drove me nuts.
Again, nowadays most audiobook apps give you the option to adjust the playback speed.
Not sure I’d like listening to the chipmunks. : )
If you still don’t believe me, go on YouTube and watch a video of someone talking with the speed set at 1.5x or 2x. It’ll sound faster, but not any chipmunkier.
Grrrr! WHY would a narrator/audiobook director decide to just mindlessly read every word that’s on the page? Going to add in the page numbers, too, idiots?
I strongly believe audiobooks don’t need the “Dave said” because you can HEAR that it’s not Dave speaking (it’s Dave’s nemesis, Contessa Protagonista of Plotsylvania, with a distinct voice).
Worst example was J.K.Rowling’s “Ink Black Heart”. I love the Cameron Strike series (though the woman has needed a good editor since “HP and the Deathly Hallows”), But that book was predominantly transcriptions of a message board. So the dates and email addresses before every single message, even single words, was laboriously read out. I could’ve skimmed over those in milliseconds with the print book, but I was on a solo cross-country trip and determined to finish it.
Her latest, “The Running Grave” is much better (still needs editing, though, but I haven’t run into any of her horrid views on trans people yet).
It’s okay to say that you don’t like audiobooks, but judging people who do as less literate or strange or aren’t quite “reading”? I think you need to understand what other people are experiencing.
Hint: they ARE reading.
Yeah, but the printed text probably doesn’t need them either. At least not when there are just two people taking turns talking, and/or when what they’re saying or their manner of speaking makes it obvious who’s saying what.
I’ve noticed that some audiobook narrators do a better job than others at making the “Bob said” tags unobtrusive.
Yeah, that’s a good example of something that works a lot better in print.
note that people say they "hear: you even when it’s written, not spoken
I dislike audiobooks because there’s only 1 narrator, usually male, and I can’t hear a female voice in male voice, which detracts from flow. to me a good audio book needs at least 3 or 4 different voices
I don’t know that I’d call listening to audiobooks “reading”. Maybe I’m being pedantic, but it’s right there in the words that are used.
It’s like calling watching a videotape of a musical performance “going to a concert” in many ways. Or for that matter, listening to a live concert album and saying the same thing.
A good narrator uses different tones and pronunciation for different characters. I listened to The Fellowship of the Ring with one narrator and it felt flat. For The Two Towers, I switched to the audiobook narrated by an actor in the movie versions (Andy Serkis). I’m impressed with how many distinctive voices he can do.
I can’t argue with what works or doesn’t work for other people, but comments like this, or complaints about audiobook narrators who don’t “do the voices,” have never made sense to me.
When I’m reading a printed book, I have no trouble telling who’s saying what, and it’s not as though the dialogue of different characters is printed in different fonts.
I grew up being read to by (and being told stories by) parents, teachers, etc. So it always seemed completely normal to me that the person reading me the story would tell me what the characters said, with their voice which, of course, didn’t sound like that character’s actual voice.
I will go so far as to agree that, ideally, a first-person-POV story should be read by someone whose voice matches the POV character.
There are audiobooks, albeit a small minority, that are narrated by a “full cast” and have different people reading the dialogue of different characters. There are also audio productions of plays, and audio dramatizations of books, where all the parts are played by different actors. But the latter is an adaptation and not the original book.
Kind of like reading the room, reading braille, or reading my mind?
I used to only like audio books for nonfiction, when I am doing something else while listening. Driving was how I learned this: I don’t like to do something else if it’s fiction.
but not too long ago I had the chance to check out both the book and the audio book for an English novel and I went chapter by chapter, first reading so I knew what happened and then listening so I could hear the dialog with wonderful accents done by someone with talent. I enjoyed it so much!
I learned from friends on goodreads that who the narrator is really matters.
TLDR: audio books can be great!
By definition, of course, listening to audiobooks is not reading. Obviously, one doesn’t have to know how to read to listen to a book.
I don’t know what the correct analogy is for describing listening to an audiobook as ‘reading’ that book, but I don’t think it’s either of these. Nobody I know has listened to a live album and then said they were at the concert. But some folks I know have listened to an audiobook and then said they have read the book. Heck, I’ve been guilty of that phrasing.
Could you imagine this same thread 600 years ago? Are you really getting the meaning by reading it off inky pages? You’re missing the storyteller’s interpretation.
This is an interesting insight and I think it describes me. I tend to grind through the plot and don’t savor the prose. I ‘read’ Moby Dick as a young adult and didn’t get much out of it for that reason.
With audiobooks it can be a different type of experience. It’s possible to relax, forget about counting pages, and enjoy the text.
I remember when we would read Shakespeare in high school and I’d struggle with making sense of what is going on. Then we’d do a field trip to see a play – same exact words, but it would be as clear as day. Sure there were a lot of other context clues, but it’s also about using different parts of the brain.
In the book Ready Player One, a plot point was some game leaderboards. Visually, you’d just skip over it or else look at the top two rows. In the audiobook, it was laboriously read out each time: “Tenth place, Superdude, ten thousand three hundred seventy-nine points… Ninth place, Awesomegal, ten thousand six hundred fifty-three points… Eighth place…”
And, since the scores were important to the story and since they kept changing, they kept reading the scores over and over and over again…
Yes, I love reading. And for the reasons I mentioned, I don’t feel that audiobooks are true to the concept and value of words on a page reading.
Curious, how would people feel about a very detailed description of a painting versus seeing the real thing?
I’ll repeat myself: I don’t know what the correct analogy is for reading a book versus listening to an audiobook, but this also isn’t correct.
Have you ever heard anybody say that they read (or listened to) a description of a painting (or a movie or a sunset or the Grand Canyon) and say that they ‘saw’ what was being described? I certainly haven’t.
Or 2000 year ago. “You didn’t ‘read’ that scroll! You had your scribe read it to you!”