Personally, I'm not impressed by people who listen to books instead of reading them. And yes, I understand that people are busier these days, perhaps, more than they've been before. As a graduate student, I find I do very little reading that isn't directly related to my courses. But I steal moments when I can. There's something about holding a book physically, turning the pages, imagining the voices in a narrative, imagining inflections and all the other little details. Having someone else do the voices for me, emote for me in an audiobook just takes away from the pleasure of a good book. And then there's the way words are laid out on a page. Or the little illustrations (remember Daddy Long Legs?).
According to an article in the New York Times, those in the audiobook recording industry are grappling with some of these issues. For one, there's the question of footnotes (the piece is aptly titled: "How Should a Book Sound? And What About Footnotes?"). Author David Foster Wallace drops his voice -- "as if he's fallen down a well" -- to indicate a footnote. Others actually say "footnote" before starting. Neither option is terribly appealing.
Then there's illustrations and graphs and charts. How do they sound? "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" has an illustration of a sad-smiley face (you know what I mean!) that, when translated for the audio version, means adding words to the text to describe it. Other illustrations are less easy to describe -- and anyway, a verbal description of a photograph or a sketch can never have the impact that actually seeing it does. The article reports that some publishers are getting past this hurdle by including a CD with the audiobook that people can look at while listening. But it seems that over half the consumers of audiobooks listen to them in cars!
Audiobooks are here to stay, so I imagine publishers will circumvent the obstacles that they're currently faced with. But I still vote for people taking a ten minute breather from their hectic schedules, picking up a book and enjoying it -- the traditional way.
