Week 10 Prompt Response (E-Book and Audiobook Appeals)

 E-Books 

 How Format Effects Book Choice 

Quarantine pushed me to start reading e-books. I had always meant to, in order to be a well-rounded librarian, but the format never appealed to me as a reader, and I find there are drawbacks (as well as pros) to the experience. 

Fewer clues exist to recommend an e-book to the online browser. Artwork is limited to a front cover image and many e-books open to the first page of chapter text, skipping cover pages and table of contents that give aesthetic clues to the book’s tone and subject. E-readers also present every title in the same font, further reducing the stylistic clues and individual feel of books. 

Length, especially, effects a book’s appeal at least to anyone with schedules and obligations. Overdrive lists file size but readers must determine book length by checking the page count after they have downloaded a book or by doing a web search first via Google or Amazon or Goodreads. Length is also a convention of specific genres; a devotee of fantasy may not want anything short of an epic page count while readers of hard-boiled detective noir would be affronted by a novel over 300 pages. 

Some e-books offer a reading sample prior to download, some don’t. What reader, contemplating a 3-D book in hand, doesn’t flip to a random page and just look at the text? The density of paragraphs, the amount of dialogue, the anticipated difficulty of a text can all be judged in this casual sweep of a few pages in the book’s middle. In his “memoir of the craft,” On Writing (2000), Stephen King wrote, “Paragraphs are almost as important for how they look as for what they say; they are maps of intent” (p. 130). E-books shrink this map and nullify the flip test.

Reader’s advisors aware of the different experience of book art, length, and page appearance for e-readers can address these differences in their recommendations. Does that horror novel with the fairly benign cover feature a title page appearing to drip blood? Make the reader aware that gore features heavily. Does the new Frederick Backman title considerably exceed the length of his previous novels? Make sure to let the reader know. Does that historical romance indulge in lengthy descriptive passages in comparison to the quick dialog wordplay of contemporary romance? Help the reader make this comparison when a flip through the book cannot. 

How Format Effects Reading Experience 

A page on the kindle is not a full page in the original print format. To a reader it might seem like she is flipping pages quickly but that getting to the end of a chapter is taking forever. My Kindle has a few options to indicate how much of a book is left but I don’t like the way it looks in the corners of my screen, a percentage in one and a page number or time stamp in the other, so I usually turn it off and fly blind. In my experience, short books feel shorter and long books feel longer on the e-reader, but I don’t know why! Dunneback (2011) wrote, “The impact of digitization of books and stories on appeal factors is most prominently felt in pacing” (p. 328). Narrative drive is felt entirely through the telling of the story and not the number of pages left on the right side of the book. When we read a book, we read one page at a time, each page is numbered by one, but when we hold a book open in our hands what we really see is a two-page spread, which the e-reader does not replicate. Like the flip test when we first pick up a book, a lot of information is subconsciously absorbed when we turn a page and see the next two pages of text. I think this difference also affects our sense of pacing. Without these visual clues the reader relies solely on the storyline to feel the book’s pacing. A messy plot that might pass muster in a physical copy could feel too clunky and confused as an e-book.

Dunneback (2011) pointed out, “Richly detailed books may also not be the best type of book to read on an e-book reader, especially if the reader is one who likes to do what I call the fan and scan to check for previously revealed information” (p. 328). I am a fan and scanner and I often feel the e-book is a step backward in evolution from the page-flipping ease of the codex to the clumsiness of the scroll. This is my biggest Kindle complaint and a drawback to recommending complicated narratives in e-format. A reader can enjoy highlighting an e-book for facts to pull later, but that feature may not make up for the loss of ease to flip pages back and forth in the moment. I also find that novels with multiple narrators suffer in the e-book format, particularly for readers who only get to read in short bursts or who experience long stretches in between readings and may want (or need) to scan back for a refresher of who spoke last, etc. With an e-book the reader cannot even glance back at the left-hand page! 

E-books are not recommended for texts that contain bonus front or back-end material that a reader may want to reference throughout, such as maps, family trees, or timelines. This week I read the e-book version of a western for my annotation. I happened to see a copy of the same book at the thrift store; when I picked it up, I was surprised to find a nicely drawn map of the book’s setting on the inside covers. Now I knew what I was really missing with my e-book version! Even if this map had been included in the beginning of my digital file, I would still have had a hard time referencing it throughout the story. 

When and where a person reads affects the experience of reading e-books. Travel, whether on the long haul or a daily commute, is particularly relevant to the appeal of e-books. My father and I have frequently praised the use of an e-book to each other when the physical book is heavy and cumbersome; him because of arthritis, me because fitting Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell in your bag and then carrying it with you all day is a recipe for neck pain. This brings up the issue of aging patrons- readers will enjoy a book much more if the font is big enough to view easily and it doesn’t hurt to hold up the book in front of their face. The convenience of the backlit e-reader for reading in bed also enhances that reading experience, especially for those patrons who might have a partner or child trying to sleep next to them. 

Audiobooks 

Narrator Appeal 

Audiobooks rely on the narrator to determine important appeal factors for the reader. The tone, voice, emphasis and pace of a narrator inform the story’s meaning and characters (Cahill & Moore, 2017). Readers may prefer performances with a full cast or multiple narrators. NoveList (2018) names a number of appeal factors to consider when judging a narrator’s delivery such as the use of regional or “folksy” accents, an energetic or detached performance, and a gravelly or gentle voice. These appeal factors should make sense with the narrative of the story; a gravelly voice reading a lighthearted summer romance doesn’t fit. Readers likely have strong opinions about added sound effects or musical accompaniment. Personally, I only want to hear music before the story begins or after the book’s close. NoveList recommended that advisors new to audiobooks look for reviews using the term “well-characterized” as this usually indicates an outstanding performance. 

Story Appeal 

Some stories transfer better to audio than others. Cahill and Moore (2017) wrote, “Books that are exciting and suspenseful in written form tend to transfer well to the audiobook format” (p. 23). Unfortunately, I cannot forget the time I tried to listen to the non-fiction book Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World on a long road trip; I made it through approximately 35 excruciatingly dull minutes of this 7.5-hour history of cod. Since the narrator, Richard M. Davidson, has quite a few books under his belt and an Earphones Award I think the subject just didn’t lend well to the audiobook format. The context I listened in, a long highway drive, could have also contributed; a more engaging fiction story would probably have been a better choice. Like the when and where of e-reading, context is important to audiobook appeal.

References:

Cahill, M. & Moore, J. (2017, Spring). A sound history: Audiobooks are music to children's ears. Children and Libraries: The Journal of the Association for Literary Service to Children, (15)1, 22-29.

Dunneback, K. (2011). E-books and readers' advisory. Reference & User Services Quarterly, (50)4, 325-329.

King, S. (2000). On writing: A memoir of the craft. Pocket Books.

NoveList. (2018). The secret language of books: A guide to appeal. https://www.ebscohost.com/uploads/novelist/pdf/NoveList_Appeal_2018.pdf.