An Audio Book Is Not A Book

Neil Gaiman asks: Heard Any Good Books Lately? An excerpt:

I grew up in a world where stories were read aloud. My mother read to me. My father and grandparents invented stories, mostly about animals, which they would tell me at bedtime.

Some of my earliest memories are listening to stories on the radio as a boy in England. I had a record of Beatrice Lillie reading the poems of Edward Lear that I played until it was one long scratch.

I read aloud whenever I could. I would read to my sisters if they would sit still long enough. I still remember being played the original 1954 Under Milk Wood in English class, and rejoicing in the words and the lilt of the voices.

I was overjoyed the first time one of my publishers let me record one of my own audiobooks, though I was slightly saddened when she explained that there would soon be no more audiobooks: Cassette tape players were vanishing from cars, and packaging long books on CD was cost-prohibitive. The audiobook was going to go the way of the dodo. I began to treasure audiobooks as beautiful things that would soon be history.

But the death of the audiobook never happened. In the past six years, I've recorded six audiobooks, and although it can be exhausting, I've loved the process and have been delighted with the result.

So is an audiobook a book? I asked audio producer Rick Harris. "Well, my feeling is that it is not a book," he said.

"An audiobook is a separate entity that is absolutely true. And a novel can be seen as many things, and one of the things it can be seen as is a script for an audio performance."

"[Bloom is] utterly correct in saying it's not a book, but it is another thing," Harris said. "It is an audiobook, and that has its own validity, its own limitations, its own strengths. The ear's ability to perceive nuance. The human voice is unquestionably the most expressive musical instrument there is. You combine those two, and you get an audiobook.

An audiobook is its own thing, a unique medium that goes in through the ear, sometimes leaving you sitting in the driveway to find out how the story is going to end.

My thanks to K.a.f.k.a.e.d. for pointing out this link.