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AUDIOBOOKS — page 2:
Which is better—abridged or unabridged?

by Jim Trelease, © 2001, 2006, 2007, 2008
including excerpts from The Read-Aloud Handbook, 5th and 6th editions

"T"he unabridged version is preferable, by far. Taking a 400-page book and reducing it to two cassettes is usually an insult to both the writer and to the listener’s attention span. On the other hand, many books are only available in abridged format, which is better than nothing, especially if you’re driving. I once took a two-day trip through rural Georgia and in a manner of speaking, at the start of the trip I picked up a hitchhiker—in a bookstore. His name was Dr. Samuel DeWitt Proctor, theologian, college president, distinguished professor, Kennedy Peace Corps administrator, and Harlem pastor. Unusual hitchhiker.

microphone and stack of books

For two days, Dr. Proctor’s audio book, The Substance of Things Hoped For, informed, inspired, admonished, and entertained me. I had never met this distinguished African-American, but at the end of our two days together, as he finished his life story, I felt I had made a new friend who widened my world. With this kind of technology at our fingertips, even the most humble of families can have the most distinguished visitors to their homes or dinner tables. And the audio department of the public library has the “guest list.”

Are semi-literates the best audience for
     audio books?

There was a time when the only people who listened to recorded books were the blind. In those days, federal law decreed that only the blind could take advantage of these recordings funded by federal moneys. With the arrival of audiocassettes and portable tape decks, a new industry was born. One of the early, and sometimes current, fears is that audio books will make readers “print lazy,” similar to the anxieties the Greeks had about writing—that it would shrivel the memory muscles.

If you’re wondering about those folks who have the time to listen to unabridged books, Helen Aron of Union College (NJ) did a random survey of 1000 renters of unabridged audio books, and the results were quite revealing.1 Renters proved to be among the most educated, literate, affluent citizens in America. The average respondee rented 11 audio books a year while personally reading an average of 12 books. Other findings included:

  • Men outnumbered women, 55 percent to 45 percent.
  • The majority of renters were in their forties and fifties.
  • 47 percent also borrow tapes from their local library.
  • 75 percent were college graduates.
  • 41 percent had postgraduate degrees.
  • 80 percent had an annual family income of $51,000 or higher.
  • 86 percent read at least one newspaper daily. 95 percent read at least one magazine monthly.
  • 21 percent read at least 25 books a year.
  • 80 percent usually listened while driving, only 7 percent while exercising.

For adults who are poor readers themselves, audio books can serve several purposes.

  • They provide a common ground upon which you and your family or class can listen to literature;
  • Since the readers are professional performers, they offer excellent role models for how to read aloud with the right expression and pace.

My personal preference for unabridged audio books (via Internet or borrowing from my local public library) is Recorded Books, Inc. (for adult titles) because of its huge catalog of titles and its superior stable of reader/narrators. The ultimate success of an audio book is determined by the reader, his timing, range of voices and emotions—and Recorded Books has the best, although Random House's Listening Library is a very close second in quality and now has the largest selection of titles from which to choose and the quality of their readers is greatly improved in recent years.

Titles listed with Recorded Books are for rent or for sale, with individuals usually choosing to rent and institutions like libraries and schools purchasing (unabridged books often have as many as eight to ten cassettes, boosting the purchase price upwards of $60). If you call for the juvenile catalog, it lists their hundreds of titles, but with only purchase prices. To get the rental price for a particular title (approximately $12 for thirty days), call (800) 638-8070, or check the title and rental price at their Web site, www.recordedbooks.com. The best bargain is their complete three-times-a-year catalog containing all their titles, not just the juvenile. This is mailed to you automatically after you've bought or rented once.

AudibleKids.com— the go-to choice for kids audio

The latest and best news ever for audio books is the arrival of AudibleKids.com, the children's division of Audible.com, that finally arrived April, 2008, bursting with more than 4,000 children titles that can be downloaded immediately for computers, iPods, or MP3 players. Categories include a wide variety choices from animal stories, biographies and history, classics and poetry, fables, fairy tales and myths, fiction, mysteries, nonfiction, parenting and teaching, and sci-fi and fantasy. Just as wide is the range of ages — from preschool to adolescence.

As for AudibleKids' costs, at first glance they appear a bit pricey — but take a second look: For Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer, the price is $17.95 for a six-hour recording. Expensive? Not when compared with a ticket to a first-run movie — which would be twice as high per hour. Compared to a movie rental, the price seems high only until you factor in that you own the audio, can replay it for years, or burn a CD to share. Not so with a movie rental which would have to be re-rented and can't be copied easily.

It took a while for the industry to wake up to the fact that millions of families now have sophisticated audio-visual connections in their cars (most of them without the once ubiquitous tape-deck) and can easily connect to iPod-like players for audio. The smarter families know the intellectual value of audio-over-video and thus will use audio books if they're available as downloads. All things considered, AudibleKids.com is now the go-to choice for audio books for kids.

Using Audio Books in the Classroom — Is that cheating?

In Dr. Kylene Beers’s ongoing research to find out what makes teenagers into readers or nonreaders, she stumbled across a Colorado middle school teacher who had successfully incorporated audio books into her class.2 The teacher had been working with a class of difficult eighth-graders, including two who were pregnant and a host of others with criminal or drug-related records. They had trouble in every subject but they really hated reading.

The teacher tried everything from assembling a library of young adult books to book talks and classroom pillows, but nothing worked until she gave up and read to them. Fifteen minutes into Joan Lowery Nixon’s The Seance, she experienced the year’s first attention-span moment. They were actually listening. So she read all that class period, and the next and the next. Days later, when she finished the book, they spontaneously erupted into a book discussion. A week later, when she finished Lois Duncan’s Killing Mr. Griffin, they earnestly compared and argued about the two books.

Though she’d finally found the key that unlocked her most difficult class, she also knew her vocal cords wouldn’t last the year. That’s when the school librarian suggested audio books. She matched each tape to its book, gathered as many tape players and headphones as she could find, and set up her class. They’d listen and follow along in their books three days a week, write and talk about what they were listening to on the fourth day, and devote the fifth day to book talks to help them find their next book.

“It was incredible. By February some of the kids were wanting to take the books home at night so they could keep reading to see what was happening. By the end of the year, all twenty-three of the kids in that reading skills class had come up about two grade levels in their reading and all had better attitudes toward reading. Audio books made the difference for those kids.”

Audiobooks for Learning Impairments

One of the mainstays of children's literature is The Horn Book Magazine. Its approach to new ideas and innovation has often been equated with The New York Times: never quick to move on a trend, avoiding the popular parade until almost everyone else has joined it. And even though The Times has enlivened its once-gray pages to the point of looking like USA Today each morning, The Horn Book still smacks of long-gray paragraphs. So it was more than worth noting in 2002 when The Horn Book made Pamela Varley's essay "As Good as Reading? Kids and the Audiobook" its lead essay.

One of the best assessments of "listening as literature," Varley's entire piece is available online at: www.hbook.com/magazine/articles/2002/may02_varley.asp. One of the items she addressed is the use of audiobooks for students (or adults) with learning disabilities. Here is a brief excerpt on that subject from her essay:

… I love the story of Rosina Williams, age twelve. As a toddler, Rosina showed all the signs of a burgeoning book lover, clamoring for more when her parents read her bedtime stories. But to their surprise, Rosina did not make the shift to avid reader as she got older. In school, where she was a very good student, she read at grade level, but she did not develop a love of reading. She still loved being read to — loved books physically, loved picking them out in the bookstore. She loved everything about books, in fact, except the reading. Tests later showed a mild dyslexia. Determined that her child not miss out on books, Rosina’s mother, literary agent Robin Rue, discovered children’s audiobooks — and Rosina took off. She gradually listened more and more — in the car, in the bath, curled up on the couch looking out the window. She listened to new books and she listened, over and over, to her old favorites, knowing just which part of just which tape she wanted to hear again. Rue marvels at her stamina — at how long she can listen in utter absorption.

Like any book lover, Rosina is opinionated about books and impassioned about the books she loves. And, like most avid readers, she is intensely hostile to abridgments. Two years ago, when she discovered to her dismay that she had acquired several abridged children’s books, she wrote an irate letter to HarperCollins, and persuaded her entire fifth-grade class to sign it. “You see, all but one of your tapes that I own has been abridged, even Roald Dahl’s,” she wrote, appalled at this last lapse of judgment in particular. HarperCollins wrote a wisely conciliatory response explaining that these were older titles, and that Harper’s new children’s audiobooks were, in fact, unabridged. But if cultivating a love of books is the point, somehow, of our worry about kids and reading, then Rosina has already gotten there, and she’s gotten there entirely by way of audiobooks. How many children care enough about books, after all, to collect signatures in defense of Roald Dahl’s literary integrity? And what author wouldn’t sell his eyeteeth for such a dedicated patron — even if she never “reads” a word he’s written?3

FOOTNOTES

1. Helen Aron, “Bookworms Become Tapeworms: A Profile of Listeners to Books on Audiocassette,” Journal of Reading, November 1992, pp. 208–12.

2. Kylene Beers, “Listen While You Read: Struggling Readers and Audiobooks,” School Library Journal, April 1998, pp. 30–35.

3. Pamela Varley, "As Good as Reading? Kids and the Audiobook," The Horn Book Magazine, May/June 2002; online at: http://www.hbook.com/magazine/articles/2002/may02_varley.asp.

NEXTInternet Radio: a treasure-trove of recordable listening

microphone and stack of books  

AUDIO BOOKS

 

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