I started a new job a few months back and with the increase in miles traveled (damned gas prices) I have taken it upon myself to check out numerous “Books on Tape” to listen to whilst en route. For those of you who are not familiar with the concept let me enlighten thee.
An audio book is nothing more than the complete (usually) novel read aloud by someone with a more attractive voice than mine, recorded with at least a degrees’ less audio quality than my answering machine’s and then shuffled of to hide in the bowels of the public library so as not to cause confusion with the page-flipping masses.
I’ve recently read/listened to “Moby Dick”, “A Farewell to Arms” and “The Grapes of Wrath” and I’ve thouroughly enjoyed all three. This works out perfect for someone who has little or no time to sit down and crack a book but who takes pleasure in the works of the masters.
Personally, I can draw parallels between reading and listening; the images are drawn in my mind, characters, places and so forth are still at the beck-and-call of my own experiences and imagination. The differences are, of course, I am not “reading” but, rather, being read to. Also, instead of sitting in my favorite chair in front of the fire with my dog at my feet, I’m flying down I-275 with deadlines to meet and customers to satisfy.
All that being told, if someone asks if I’ve read “Moby Dick”, I say, simply, “Yes”, and call me Ishmael.
Regarding the OP – don’t assume that because your library apparently hides them that this is true in all cases. My library has them as almost the first thing you see when you walk in.
No, it’s not cheating. You get the same information, and you can do it when otherwise you’d be listening to that same pop tune for the 14,583rd time otherwise.
My mind wanders when I do either one – so it doesn’t make much difference. Except that if I space out while reading, it’s easier to turn back the pages to find my place than it is to rewind the tape.
I’ve only listed to one audio-book – Stephen King’s “Blood and Smoke”. King did the reading, and it was funny – listening him trying to sound like a crazed waiter in the first story, making “eeee eeeee” noises, and then trying to talk with an accent. (I guess he never claimed to be an actor.)
I’m not thrilled with the concept, but that’s mostly because audio-books are so expensive. I realize they’re free from the library, but if a book is good, I want to own it, lend it, share it, re-read it, etc.
Listening is a different process than reading, but for prose I do not think there is a significant difference in the quality of the experience. You lose a little room for imagination to play due to the emphasis and delivery of the reader, but I would not worry too much about it.
Some nonfiction works rely heavily on charts, tables, graphs, etc. In such cases it is much more difficult to internalize the material through listening alone. For poetry, I find lisening to be far superior to reading.
BTW – my main objection to books on tape is that the works are almost always abridged. I knew a woman who “edited” books for audio treatment, and I was frankly horrified at the nature of her work.
I agree with Spiritus. You lose a little in the emphasis (or gain a little, depending on how you look at it), but you still get the essential reading experience (for example, you still picture the characters in your mind). I further agree with him that abridging is horrible. I hate it. I want to hear the whole story, the way the author wrote it, not some cut-up version that leaves out half the important details. When I look for new writers at the library, I always choose an unabridged tape over an abridged one.
One thing that is funny about some books on tape is that you can catch the readers in poor pronunciations. The funniest one was one of William Shatner’s Star Trek novels read by Shatner. He didn’t even know how to pronounce a couple of the words he used! And he’d have known if he bothered to watch the new Trek shows he was writing about!
I was involved when one of Piers Anthony’s books was being prepared for audio tape, and the “publisher” sent a request for pronunciation guidance on over a hundred words. I can only assume that either the house Shatner was working with was less thorough or that Willie the Great couldn’t even be bothered to read the guide before reading the book.
I personally could never listen to the books on tape. I wouldn’t pay attention or listen, my mind would wander. Even if I paid close, strict attention, it would all be lost on me anyway. For some reason I just can’t comprehend things I hear. I have to write things down and re-read them in order to understand. When I’m in school, I literally have notebooks of notes, so I can understand what the teacher is saying.
Spiritus: I would guess it’s your second option – that he wouldn’t bother to look it up, and apparently the others working on the project (director, producer, whoever) didn’t know how to pronounce the words either.
Winky said, “And now the debate: Is “listening” to a book cheating? Isn’t part of reading, actually reading? Do you retain more if you read or listen? Discuss.”
Can’t you just imagine the old story tellers and sages saying, “You’re going to write this down? You won’t need to even listen? Isn’t this cheating?”
UL or not wasn’t it supposed to be Augustine who first realized one could read silently and still be “reading” even when no one could hear you?
I suppose the retention rate of what an individual reads or listens to or even watches on TV will vary greatly according to the individual, interest level, and difficulty level of the material itself. I think I’d do better with bird songs on tape and the symbols of the elements on paper.
Reading a book and having a book read to you are fundamentally different things.
Think about it this way: if you attend a performance of “Hamlet,” can you then turn around and tell people you’ve read “Hamlet”? Sure, all of the words in the play were spoken out loud for you to hear, but it’s not the same thing as reading it.
Spiritus captured the essence of the difference:
Actually, I think you lose a lot more. With books on tape, the reader decides what sort of tone, inflection, pace, and so on to give characters in dialogue, rather than you deciding that. After reading “Catch-22” several times, I listened to it as a book on tape, and was upset when the reader chose to give characters different voices than I had mentally given them. I found that those changes affected the way I pictured the characters and therefore changed the way in which I appreciated the book.
The same is true for non-dialogue parts of a book. A person reading an audio book may not emphasize the same parts of the book that would “catch your ear” as you read it to yourself. One reader might give less attention to descriptive passages in favor of dialogue, another might passionately read those same passages, creating two different impressions in the listener about the same words. The stylistic choices that a reader makes in reading the words out loud is inevtiably going to be different from the stylistic choices you would make reading it yourself, and those differences could have a significant effect on what you get out of the book.
Fun exercise: Read a passage out of your favorite book out loud. Then have 10 friends read it out loud. Compare. Do all the different readings convey exactly the same types of feel?
I think the main reason I like to read is that I can be totally immersed into a story. While I’m reading my focus is on the words and sentences. Even though I haven’t “listened” to a book, it seems like it would be a very different experience. If I am driving and listening, my focus has shifted to the road. I don’t know that I would get the same feeling from the book.
Has anyone read and “listened” to the same book? Was the experience different? Which did you prefer?
I have both read and listened to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, as read by Martin Shaw. The entire text is there, excepting one short chapter which did nothing but describe the geography of Beleriand. (It takes up 13 CD’s, so that should indicate to you how much your average audiobook is abridged.)
I prefer reading it myself, but that in no way means that the audio version lacks merits of its own. It is simply a different medium, and serves another purpose. I listen either when I am driving or involved in another task that doesn’t demand my full attention. Reading, on the other hand, usually does require enough of my attention that other tasks are impossible to perform adequately. While I can sit down and read a good book, I cannot personally listen to one without finding something else to occupy myself with.