Week 11 Prompt: Ebook & Audiobook Advisory Issues

 

Ebooks and audiobooks are a part of our landscape. What does the change in medium mean for appeal factors?

 

I have become more of an e-reader user in the past few years than I ever expected to be. I love that I can download a library book straight to my Kindle without leaving the comfort of my chair. I also like reading ebooks while on the treadmill; it is so convenient to have the ebook lay flat and just tap at the screen to turn pages, rather than having to have some kind of binder clip attached so the pages stay open, and turn each page with my sweaty fingers.

 

As far as a change in appeal factors goes, I think the cover of the book likely doesn’t matter as much. When you are “shopping” for a book, sometimes the attractiveness of the cover can help catch your eye. I barely think about what the covers of my checked-out ebooks look like. I also think that illustrations and maps may not matter as much. My e-reader gauges my reading speed based on the first few pages, so I try not to linger too long on a map page at the front of the book. I would also much rather read a comic or manga as a print book than an e-reader; I can’t imagine trying to discern details in the shrunken images, or read the small text bubbles easily.

 

If you can't hold a book and feel the physical weight of it in your hands, how does that affect your knowledge of the genre? How about readers being able to change the font, line spacing, and color of text - how does that affect pacing and tone?

 

I don’t see how e-readers would affect knowledge of a genre. As long as I’m reading the book and absorbing the content, that is what matters. The only way I could see changing spacing affecting pacing is if a publisher specifically printed a “big reveal” to be on the next page, or for there to be a purposeful space between text. It would also probably be strange to read a dark fantasy in a hot pink text font. And as mentioned in the reading, “There may be some visual arrangements of the text that a reader needs to see to understand an author's intention,” (Mediatore, 2003, p. 318).

One of the issues noted in our class reading mentioned “lack of physical indication as to how much left you have of the book to read,” but that has never been an issue for me (Dunneback & Trott, 2011, p. 326). My Kindle is nearly a decade old and tells me how many minutes I have left in a chapter, and I can switch that to a page number view or percentage view. Another issue suggested is “It is not easy to jump between points in the book if you do not know exactly where you are going,” which I understand to a degree, but again the functionality of the Kindle allows for bookmarks, chapter jumps, and you can easily “flip” back through pages so I see that as a non-issue.

I honestly think that a lot of people prefer the tactile nature of physical media, and it is okay to not have a functional reason to prefer it.

 

How about audiobooks? Track length, narrator choice, is there music? 

 

From my own experience, the narrator of an audiobook, or “audible presentation,” immensely affects the experience of absorbing the content of a novel. I have listened to A Song of Ice and Fire books narrated by an older British man who pronounces a lot of the names very strangely (for example, Brienne as “brai-een” rather than “bree-enne”) and it was often odd to hear a young girl’s point of view read by an old man whose “characterization” made her sound like a hag. I listened to The Bookshop on the Corner read by a younger woman who really could not convey the masculinity of the love interest characters. It actually made me laugh out loud when she lowered her voice in an attempt to characterize.

I am currently listening to The Starless Sea which actually has two narrators, one of which I can’t stand because he pauses frequently and gasps at the end of each phrase, and it totally takes me out of the “zone.” In that situation, the book is divided into essentially two different stories, and the one with the narrator I don’t like is much easier to digest in printed format.

In a more positive experience, I listened to The Kite Runner read by the author himself, and he was able to pronounce words exactly as intended, which was important because there were a lot of non-English words and phrases, and various accents he was able to portray that added meaning to the dialogue.

 

 

References

 

Dunneback, K., & Trott, B. (2011). E-books and Readers’ Advisory. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 50(4), 325–329.

 

Mediatore, K. (2003). Reading with Your Ears: Readers’ Advisory and Audio Books. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 42(4), 318–323.