eBook and Audiobook Appeal

 eBook and Audiobook Appeal

I’ve only recently begun to borrow audiobooks, with my fancy new 45-minute commute to work, each way. And I’ve discovered that there are amazing audiobooks and average audiobooks and terrible audiobooks. The narrator, I think, makes a huge difference. After all, who wouldn’t want to listen to Stephen Fry reading Sherlock Holmes? And Edward Herrmann, who I adored as Richard on Gilmore Girls, has an incredible collection that he read, including Unbroken and The Tommyknockers. With the right narrator, an audiobook is almost more appealing that reading a physical copy, and that is not an opinion I ever thought I would have.

My boyfriend participated in my final project, so I interviewed him and recommended The Way of Kings, the first in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive. He almost exclusively reads via audiobook and it is available through IPL on Overdrive. That was about 6 weeks ago, and he is already on Rhythm of War, the fourth book in the series. He has a warehouse job that allows him to listen to headphones all day, so he gets through almost 8 hours each day. For someone like him, audiobooks hold tremendous appeal; they require little to no effort and allow for multitasking.

As a side note though, I listened to some of the first book and it did not have the same appeal to me as reading the book did. I felt like I already had the voices for these characters in my mind and my brain couldn’t wrap around the idea of these new, unfamiliar voices.

While not personally a fan of eBooks, the convenience and appeal are easy to discern. The ease of pulling up a book on your tablet while commuting or traveling or even just sitting at home, is remarkable and offering them to library patrons is a great way to encourage circulation for those who can’t always make it to the library. And it goes without saying, though I’m writing it anyway, that eBooks were a lifesaver for thousands of library users over the last year. People have access to more titles than they ever have, and with the ability to change the font size and line spacing, eBooks are a great option for elderly or near-sighted users. When I worked at Barnes & Noble, I had a gentleman come in looking for a page magnifier for his mom, who had difficulty finding large print versions of books she likes. I ended up selling him on one of the Nook tablets, helped him install some basic apps so she could borrow or buy books, and he was the over moon with how much easier this made reading for his mom!

eBooks can also help solve the age-old issue of what to do with the 40 copies of a one-time bestseller that now sees the occasional circulation. Or at least it might, if publishers continue to allow regular purchase of eBook editions for libraries. I read through Schwedel’s article and while I understand where Macmillan is coming from, from a business perspective, it should be on the consumers to figure out how to adjust the practices of publishers as the digital publishing world grows. Their costs to produce digital books is a fraction of what a physical book costs. It should be on them to figure out how to balance marketing and royalty costs with the decrease in purchased material profit.