Enjoy that Audiobook

Finer

I am one of those people that when I find something I like, I cannot get enough of it And so I am always searching and downloading that next great audiobook. I wonder how everyone cannot love audiobooks but then I ask. William, an undergraduate journalism student, changed his mind more than once between the unicorn and the sloth library card design and insisted audiobooks don’t work for him. “Lack of attention span,” he said. Ninety-year-old Jean waved away the thought of listening to another audiobook “It was so boring.” She leaned closer to gather her books off the front desk. “Maybe it was a bad narrator.” I mentioned that downloading audiobooks opened my world and she said she might give it another try I agreed with her that it is too hard to sit still and listen.

For me, the story behind Audible makes me love audiobooks even more Don Katz, a writer, frustrated with yet again changing his audiobook tape cassette mid-run, worked for years to find a better way. His ideas about downloading audiobooks were way ahead of the technology

He was not a tech guy, yet he used his skills as a journalist covering world events for Rolling Stone Magazine to think in a bigger way After he first launched a dedicated device to download audiobooks in 1997, Audible almost went out of business many times. His belief in what he was creating was the motivating factor, not money, even though Audible was eventually sold to Amazon for three hundred million. He believed in the power of oral storytelling, the joy of listening to audiobooks and the positive impact reading along with a recorded book has on language processing challenges

Katz’s literary mentor, the writer Ralph Ellison, woke him up to the influence of oral culture on American literature “The sound of our language is beautiful, and to have it professionally intoned and interpreted—it’s just another interesting intellectual dimension of longer storytelling.”

As storytellers and librarians, we see the pleasure children get from being read to, and why does that need to stop as we age? As Katz defending his decision to leave a good literary career for ‘this inferior form of audio transmission, reminded critics that “Greeks were dead set against text in every way. Everything that made the difference intellectually, for thousands of years, was oral culture ”

It is easy to forget how different the experience with audiobooks was before having the ability to download them. Lynette, recently retired, was excited that the Libby app I helped her download gave her access to audiobooks in addition to ebooks. “I used to listen to audiobooks on CDs in the car but it has been so long,” she said as she moved her reading glasses to the top of her head She smiled about having a good use for the bluetooth speaker gifted to her. Things today are so different than when Katz was starting Audible. Then there would be a small shelf in the back of the bookstore with audiobooks that all cost too much The market was small and when publishers gained traction with people who wanted to listen to audiobooks, they raised prices. It was considered industry growth when audiobooks increased from $19 95 to $40 00

If Jean decides to give audiobooks another try, she will have a much better chance of finding a ‘good’ narrator as actors are encouraged to add an interpretive layer to the reading of the book. Audible has a digital self-service platform for authors and actors to meet, hold auditions, and produce audiobooks remotely. There is a whole community of trained actors, who can keep forty and fifty characters in their head, reading books to us

Katz’s excitement is contagious but sometimes it takes science to convince people about the benefits of audiobooks Research at the University of California, Berkeley, found the brain responses of people listening or reading stories lit up the same areas on brain scans. “[W]ords tend to activate the same brain regions with the same intensity, regardless of input ”

In addition to his desire to make listening to an audiobook as easy as possible on his runs, Katz saw firsthand the benefits of audiobooks on learning through the experience of his oldest daughter. As a kid, she had language processing challenges, a dyslexia-like learning problem. She learned to read by synchronizing Library of Congress tapes with a paperback so she could listen and read at the same time. Beyond what they were told to expect, his daughter became a teacher, an A student, earning dual Masters’ degrees

Cosmo put down the books he was processing and agreed there is a benefit to listening to audiobooks, but ‘only those books that don’t take too much concentration’ since he does more than one thing as he listens He prefers to hold a book that takes more concentration in his hands as he reads. Maybe there is a reason the first downloaded book was the self-help book, Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, rather than a literary masterpiece

Whatever type of audiobook you choose to listen to even as you exercise, drive, clean, cook or engage in any other task, there are still so many benefits even if you are concentrating less Listening to audiobooks keeps you engaged, improves pronunciation, listening skills, focus and attention. You experience the story in a lively way and develop empathy for the characters I am proof to the claim that listening to audiobooks boosts our mental health.

References

1. Guy Raz (host), November 21, 2021, Audible: Don Katz, How I built this with Guy Raz

2 Uzoamaka Maduka, Interview with Donald Katz, CEO & Founder of Audible com, August Issue, The American Reader (stopped publishing in 2015)

3. Maduka, August Issue, The American Reader.

4. Maduka, August Issue, The American Reader

5 Maduka, August Issue, The American Reader

6 Jennifer Walter, Audiobooks or Reading? To our Brains, it Doesn’t Matter, August 22, 2019, Discover Magazine (on-line).

7. Raz, Audible: Don Katz, How I built this with Guy Raz

8. Subodh Sharma, 10 Amazing Benefits of Audiobooks Every Book Lover Should Know, posted on Gladreaders