Chase Talks about Audiobooks and EBooks

AUDIOBOOKS

My own personal experiences with audiobooks can be put into four separate categories: enjoyment, necessity, a solo road trip, and pure torture. My first experiences of audiobooks were pure delights. Of Gremlins movie tie-in books that Hardee’s gave out during the movie’s first run. (The audio for these can be found on YouTube.) Many years later in high school, I had procrastinated in reading The Old Man and the Sea until the last day, so I went to the library and got the abridged audiobook. I probably would have done better on the essay test had I not listened to the audiobook. Jumping ahead several more years, I drove out of state to attend training for work and brought along a David Sedaris book-on-CD narrated by the author and his sister, Amy. I had already read the book, so it was a nice companion for the trip. However, one thing eventually made me vow to never listen to an audiobook in a car again - my mom. She insisted that she only had about five more minutes left before it was over. It was 45+ minutes of wanting to jump out of the car while some flowery-speaking woman talked on and on. Just torture.
course, I’m talking about the read-along storybooks that came with a small, narrated record that chimed when it was time to turn the page. My favorite audiobook series has to be the

After our class readings, I noticed that my experiences lean strongly into the appeal factors of audiobooks. For instance, in the Gremlins series, the narration set the tone of the movie, which was at times light-hearted and other times dark. Light background music and different voices for speaking characters also added to the effect. With the David Sedaris audiobook, no one else but the author could narrate his works because his writings are a deep reflection of his personality. His tone and pacing are just natural. Plus, Amy Sedaris is a master of different characters, and they play well off each other. Now The Old Man and the Sea had no appeal factors for me. First of all, the story was not something I was interested in, but the story moved so slowly as the narrator read in an over-serious way. Maybe some splashing of water or shark noises in the background would have helped. That experience along with my mom’s selection shows that the major appeal factors of print books are still at the heart of audiobook appeal factors. Two of the four I mentioned had an interest for me to begin with while the other two probably would not have appealed to me with any narrator or effects.

EBOOKS

I once was helping a woman at the circulation desk find some titles that she had to read for her evening class. We were able to find most of them while others she would have to wait for. I did a quick search in our Overdrive catalog to see if there were any overlaps. When I suggested to her that some of her titles were available there, she recoiled in disgust. She told me that she liked the feel of the book as she lifted one up and down. She loved the smell of books as she opened one up a waved her hand between the pages and her nose as if she was smelling the aroma of pasta sauce. I really tried not to laugh, but it was very mellow dramatic. EBooks had absolutely no appeal factor to her and her tactile affection for a physical relationship with books.

I, on the other hand, prefer to read eBooks. I use the Kindle app on my iPad, and many of its features appeal to me. My most favorite is that it detects the reader’s reading speed and gives them an estimate of how many minutes are left in a chapter or with a tap how much time is left for the entire books. That’s great when you tell yourself that you’re going to get in one more chapter when you should be going to bed. “It’s only a five-minute chapter.” The app also allows the reader to highlight passages and make notes for easy retrieval. Sometimes I’ll mark character introductions because I sometimes forget who people are. Even if I didn’t, I can search for terms to go back to something I missed. Highlighting lets you look up definitions to words as well as bringing up possible Wikipedia pages for quick reference. Pages can also be bookmarked so you can go back to something you felt was important. I was once told by a patron that they didn’t like eBooks because they couldn’t read the font, but readers can change the font and its size. They even developed a font with dyslexic readers in mind to make reading easier. The only physical books I purchase are ones that are of interest to me (certain authors, series, etc.) as well as collectible (anything on my favorite TV shows, movies, and collections.) There is room in my world for both physical and electronic books.