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.
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.
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