so. i understand where the sentiment "listening to an audiobook is the same thing as reading the book" is coming from - i mean, yes, the bottom line is you are taking in the same words in what is possibly a more accessible (or maybe just more enjoyable) format for you! and i'm 100% in agreement that "book snobs" who say "no you didn't really read it" if you listened to the audiobook are full of shit. ofc you should engage with stories in whatever way works for you, there is no moral or intellectual superiority to reading words off a page vs. listening to them
but it also is different? an audiobook is a performance. choices a narrator makes about line readings can drastically influence the meaning of the lines. even just different voices, accents, etc. - there are creative choices being made by the person delivering the words to you, and that affects your experience of the story in a different way than if you were making those choices in your own head. it might even change the way you visualize what's going on!
this isn't a bad thing it's just An Actual Thing & i think it's worth talking about. it rubs me the wrong way when people act like accommodations (and for many people audiobooks are an accommodation) always result in a completely identical experience, or even that they should, & if you suggest that people accessing media in different ways are having different experiences it's somehow ableist
anyway on rare occasions i really enjoy audiobooks but mostly they are much less accessible to me than words on a page (i need to be able to reread, flip back and forth, go at my own pace) & i also just really strongly prefer to encounter a text on my own before hearing someone else's performance of it, if possible! again i don't think it's "better" to read a physical book i just think it is a Distinct form of experiencing a story & acting like the two things are entirely the same is sort of doing a disservice to both
Good points, and (in my limited experience) I’ve found that making audio adaptations is a very different experience too - someone came to me with a proposal to do an audio/motion comic version of Replaceable Parts, and it was fascinating to take their direction as I recorded my cameo as the voice of [REDACTED]. Like, I made the source material, but this project is helmed by someone else with their own vision for this medium that I’ve never worked in.
And I’m not sure how much control authors generally have over audiobook adaptations, but it absolutely requires its own skillset and personnel! I resent Hollywood’s idea that different mediums are both in a strict hierarchy and totally interchangeable, but dismantling it will require open discussion of all the decisions that go into an adaptation.
Incidentally, the difference was less pronounced when audiobooks were primarily being created as a tool for accessibility. When I was a kid, my grandmother would sometimes let me read her audiobooks from the National Library for the Blind.
Unlike modern consumer audiobooks, these were created specifically as an accessibility tool for people who were blind or print disabled - they were often read by volunteers rather than professional voice actors, much less effort went into making them "polished", and there was very minimal acting. This was intentional - my blind relatives were pretty unhappy when the reader added their own emphasis and interpretation. The idea was that audiobooks were intended to be as close to a print equivalent as possible, which included having a faithful (and non-embellished) reproduction of the text.
This is arguably a case of a "reverse curb cut effect". Audiobooks are now much more widely available and affordable, which is great, but in the process they became a slightly less pure accessibility tool.
Does emotion and emphasis harm the accessibility? I had no idea
y'all i am going to rephrase what i said in the original post for clarity because the point is being wildly missed here: accessibility is not about having exactly the same experience. the idea of a "pure" accessibility tool is baffling to me. the whole. point. of the post. is that different methods of accessing stories ARE DIFFERENT. they are not better or worse or pure or impure!
also it doesn't really matter whether an audiobook is polished or has a trained actor reading it. the difference is inherent to listening to a voice. THIS IS OKAY. it's just a thing!
Thank you; I appreciate the clarification. I wasn't sure.
I can't help thinking about how print is, in a sense, an accessibility tool as well! Stories were told orally long before they were written down; the written word (and later, print) just allowed for the wider dissemination of materials that wouldn't have been accessible to most people via word of mouth. Audiobooks are a way of participating in a human tradition that long predates written/printed books.
