I think that listening to books is an acquired taste driven by necessity and convenience. There are many disadvantages to listening audiobooks. But their few advantages make them preferable in certain situations. Let's start with the disadvantages of audiobooks.
You cannot go back and forth through an audiobook the way you go through a paperbook. (
Paperbook, now that's my invention. Perhaps a Lexis-Nexis search a hundred years from now will show me as the original coiner of the word in this sense. Then again, it may already have been used - considering how obvious it sounds.) iPod, for example, is especially biased towards music listeners. Even its menu says Artists, Songs, etc. There's no way that I know of using which you can change that to mean Authors and Books, for example. What's worse is that you cannot bookmark an audiobook while you are listening to it. And the books that you download from Audible.com do not come with these bookmarks either. This means that you cannot jump from, say Chapter 10 to Chapter 20. The whole of the audiobook is one amorphous chunk of bytes. You can, using the quick access feature (what is is actually called?) in iPod, jump from say a position of 20 minutes and 30 seconds to 35 minutes and 40 seconds. But, how does that help you, or anyone?
There's no quick replay. Meaning there's no easy way if I just wanted to listen to the last 15 seconds of what I'd just heard once again. If I were reading a paperbook, on the other hand, I can simply move my eye a few paragraphs up, or move to the previous page.
Listening to an audiobook can sometimes feel like slooow death. Most of us can read much faster than we can listen. Since clarity is one of the most important characteristics of an audiobook, the books are read quite slowly. Certain books are read too slow in my opinion, but in most cases they are read slow because that's the limitation imposed by the medium itself.
Certain books are simply not suited to be audiobooks. How do you describe a picture in audio? Or how can follow a reasonably complex mathematical equation in audio?
Finally, there's no substitute for the sheer physicalness of a paperbook in our minds. Perhaps a generation or two from now, people will be so used to "reading" books via digital media that it's taken for granted. But, ours is a generation is still dominated by paper. Current technology doesn't even come close to replacing the experience of an inexpensive, handy paperbook.
In the next part, I will talk about the advantages of audiobooks.
