Week 11 Prompt

Ebooks and audiobooks are a part of our landscape. What does the change in medium mean for appeal factors? If you can't hold a book and feel the physical weight of it in your hands, how does that affect your knowledge of the genre? How about readers being able to change the font, line spacing, and color of text - how does that affect pacing and tone? How about audiobooks? Track length, narrator choice, is there music?  For this week, I want you to think about how ebooks and audiobooks affect appeal factors - also think about appeals that are unique to both mediums. Please feel free to use your own experience and that of your (anonymous of course) patrons.

In considering the medium of ebooks and audiobooks, I feel like appeal factors are definitely still there but unlike physical books, ebooks and audiobooks need to be examined a little more in order to find those appeal factors. Take Harry Potter for example: if I see one of the thicker books on a shelf, I get a little wary of it because I’ll have to actually sit down with the giant book, whereas, if I find an audiobook, I can listen to it while I am working on laundry, washing dishes, or doing a homework assignment, so it’s much less intimidating to me. When it comes to not having the physical weight of a book to influence my knowledge of a genre, I don’t personally consider it to matter that much, especially because other aspects kind of fill in that gap for me to draw some conclusions. I know that when I am using an audiobook, I definitely pay attention to the overall length of the audio as to the depth of content that I am going to be taking in through that format, and I also pay attention to the percentage that is supplied to me whenever I am reading an ebook. 

In terms of pacing and tone, I have had a number of experiences with changing up ebooks on a computer screen so that I am more comfortable with the format, and I’ve also played around with the speed on audiobooks quite a bit as well. According to Kaite Mediatore, “in audio books, how a narrator approaches the pacing of the story can determine how interested the reader-listener becomes in the book,” and a narrator is definitely one of the major appeal factors that I weigh while choosing an audiobook for myself, and I’m notoriously picky about the narrators that I choose to let occupy my time (Mediatore, 2003, p. 319). Furthermore, if I can change font, screen color, or track speed, that seemingly tiny detail can make or break my desire to read or listen to a book. With ebooks, I like to use the "dark" option that turns the screen black and text white, and now that I think about it, that setting could make books definitely seem more intense. I tend to find myself much more picky with audiobooks though, especially because I like to listen to them on my breaks at work. I work part time right now, and as a part time employee at my library, I get a fifteen minute break for every four hours I work. Since I work in five hour blocks, I only have fifteen minutes to put on an audiobook and make it through at least one chapter. Therefore, I want to find audiobooks that have shorter chapters or has a narrator whose voice doesn't sound terrible at 2x speed. I have never really paid attention to the music on audiobooks, but I know that too much background noise on an audiobook will make me quit listening. 

Reference

Mediatore, K. (2003). Reading with your ears: Readers’ advisory and audio books. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 42(4), 318-323.