Audiobook Controversy

Apparently book clubs are fraught with controversy over whether listening to an audiobook counts as reading the book. Surprisingly little attention is paid in the article to whether the audiobooks in question are abridged--maybe this is not as big a deal as it used to be. I used to have a very difficult time finding unabridged versions of the books I wanted to buy. I remember getting a copy of Neverwhere that was abridged, and also a copy of Last Chance to See. It used to be insanely difficult to find unabridged audio versions of books, and back then when my eyesight got whole orders of magnitude worse every year, this worried me deeply. I assumed that I would someday be blind, and it drove me crazy to think of getting 30% fewer words by Neil Gaiman than a sighted person.

If the audiobook isn't abridged, I think it's probably a roughly equivalent experience. It's certainly not like reading the Cliff Notes, and it's millions of times better than not reading the book. For the average book club choice, my only quibble with an audiobook would be that I could read it faster.

Admittedly, an audio reading is definitely a performance, and a performance is an interpretation. If the person reading the book decides that Hermione is annoying or Snape is evil, that might color your experience of the book, which is probably why I would never, ever consider substituting an audiobook for the first reading of a book by one of my favorite authors. But then I'm also the kind of person who gets a lot of pleasure out of the tactile presence of books, and the kind of person who really savors a first reading of a good book. That's also why I don't like to talk about books by my favorite writers before I've read them.

For subsequent readings, even of favorite books, I often favor audio, and I've been known to listen to them until they just stop working (back when they were cassettes). Audiobooks I ran until the tapes broke included The World According to Garp, two of the Harry Potter novels, every Douglas Adams book and the Hitchhiker's Radio Series, and several James Herriott books. Juliet Stevenson's reading of Jane Austen is fantastic, and probably kept me from skipping bits that I would not have re-read if I had the book in front of me.

And finally, I know at least one person who's a horrible book snob who'd think it was a sin to "read" an audiobook. That's usually a sure sign that it's something enjoyable.