Week 11 Prompt: Ebook and Audiobooks

At the beginning, when ebooks were becoming readily available and everyone touted the power of their Kindle or Nook or Kobo reader--I stayed with the physical, printed page. I told people it was because I liked the feel of the book, liked the aesthetic of a physical bookshelf--but honestly? I couldn't afford an ereader, so I made up excuses for why I didn't want one. So, when my sister gave me a Kindle for my birthday one year, I was still holding onto those ideas in my mind and barely used it. I started using it for college classes when the ebook was cheaper than the physical copy of some required reading.

It was nice to be able to control the font size and the background color, although this was just the basic Kindle so there were only two options (black or white). This didn't really affect the pacing for me, though, as it was really just to prevent eye strain occasionally. Pacing, for me, doesn't have anything to do with font size. Is that a thing? I didn't know that was a thing. Pacing has more to do with sentence structures and the amount of action happening in a book, or if there's a lot of dialogue, or description. The tone plays into the pacing as well--but font size? I just couldn't figure out how that would affect pacing.

I will say that holding the book can tell someone if they're going to read it or not. Just having a number of pages to look at on a screen doesn't give them the heft of the material, or the richness of detail put into the spine or the roughness of the paper--all selected just for this book, in some cases. I've noticed on my Kindle that some books with illustrations will be distorted as well. The image will be cut into multiple slides on the ereader, so you don't get the full effect of the image. Obviously, this is true for the audiobook version as well, because you can't hear the picture. I listened to Every Heart a Doorway, so when I picked up another book in the series and it touted the illustrations for the series, I was afraid I had missed something by listening to the book (I hadn't. The illustrations aren't in the first book in that series, only in later ones.). This is the same case for books that are published specifically for the addition of their artwork. There's a series of books out now from Aaron Mahnke, who runs the Lore podcast. The stories in the books are from the podcast, so they've already been read aloud--but the illustrations are one of the selling points for these as books. You miss something about the aesthetic of these books if you just listen to them.

As for the narrator of audiobooks, I think this is the most polarizing factor about this format. There are some narrators who just should not be reading audiobooks. There are others that are perfect for it. I've read/listened to some really great titles whose narrators enhanced every aspect of their book. For example, Jesse Eisenberg reads the Curse Workers trilogy by Holly Black--and it totally fits. If you're visualizing Jesse Eisenberg as the main character in these books, it fits the character description to a T. His semi-anxious, kinda awkward, halfway nerdy voice is completely accurate. Other books, like biographies read by the author--these work, too, because they are exactly correct with the inflection and it's how the author wanted it read.

There are some that don't work as well, though. If a series of books is read by one narrator, and then, due to publisher changes, isn't read by the same narrator for other books in the series... doesn't that just change everything? You've got this voice you've grown to know and associate with these characters, and then suddenly they're not the same. This was the case when I was reading/listening to the Anita Blake series. Kimberly Alexis was the narrator for most of the series, and then for about 5-6 books in the middle, she wasn't. I read those. (I had already read this series a while back, so this was a reread for me) I didn't want to change the voice in my head to someone else and mess with the mental image I had formed. This is a series that has music as well, especially in intense action scenes. It can be enhancing in some areas, but it feels a little weird in others (like when its hitting the end of a track length and it's not in a good breaking point).

There are some books I have outright quit when I couldn't get into the narrator. This was the case for Cassandra Clare's Infernal Devices series. I hadn't tried any of her other titles out, and so I tried Clockwork Angel on audio and couldn't get 5 minutes in. I didn't like the narrator. When I read the books, however, I went through them very quickly and then onto her other series. The narrator's voice just didn't fit with my mental image of the characters.


As for unique appeals, ereaders have the sense of privacy to them that isn't available to someone reading a physical copy of a book. This was one of the reasons touted for Fifty Shades of Grey  skyrocketing into popularity: the ereaders made it private, so people couldn't see that you were reading erotica. So many of our Overdrive ebook titles are erotica, and we have much less of it on our physical shelves. They don't get checked out in their physical form! But they do get checked out as an ebook.

Unique appeal for audiobooks rests with the narrator, though, and in the fact that you can do other things while listening. Some titles might be intense, so they need your focus more, so I could see that being a detriment to audio's appeals. Audiobooks, I think, can cater more to the listener looking for a "light read."

In any case, I've tried both of them and I can see the appeal to both. I like to be able to listen to books while I'm working, and with a toddler an audiobook makes life a whole lot easier because he's not pulling on the pages I'm trying to read. Ebooks are a little harder with him, though, cause he wants to find out what I'm doing with a tablet or my phone, and of course there's buttons to press.