Book World: Too many narrators can turn an audiobook into a confusing radio play
Katherine A. Powers, The Washington Post
Feb. 16, 2021
FacebookTwitterEmail
The Cold Millions/The Night FireRamdom House Audio/HarperAudio - handout
Are audiobooks books? Certainly listening to a book is a different experience from reading it: Backtracking to check details in an audiobook is awkward, and, in many cases, you don t retain as much as you do with the printed version. Finally, there s the difficult-to-define relationship of listener to book: Your own imagination and interpretation have more independence when reading a book yourself than when a narrator s voice controls the text. Audiobooks could be said to be a species of translation: Although true to the words, they are different in character from the original, the printed page. But they are books all the same.