Digital Audiobooks

Iben Have, Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317588061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Édition

Audiobooks are rapidly gaining popularity with widely accessible digital downloading and streaming services. This book engages with the digital form of audiobooks, framing audiobook listening as both a remediation of literature and an everyday activity that creates new reading experiences that can be compared to listening to music or the radio. Have and Stougaard Pedersen challenge the historical notion that audiobook listening is a compensatory activity or a second-rate reading experience, while seeking to establish a dialogue between sound studies and media studies, comparative literature, aesthetics, and sociology.

1 The Digital Audiobook in Between

You insert the earbuds into your ears and activate the play button on the smartphone’s display. The first thing you hear is an acoustic piano playing a laid-back blues tune that puts you in a slightly melancholy mood. After 10 seconds the piano is supplemented by a deep male voice saying, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, by Barack Obama. Read for you by the author.” The music continues, several instruments are added, and the reference to (African) American folk music becomes gradually clearer. After 30 seconds another deep male voice is heard. It is different from the first, as it is placed further back in the soundscape, and the tempo is raised. The voice is recognizable and has already been presented:

Over a decade has passed since this book was first published. The opportunity to write the book came, when I was in law school, the result of my election as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. In the wake of some modest publicity, I received an advance from a publisher and went to work with the belief that the story of my family, and my efforts to understand that story, might speak in some way to the fissures of race that have characterized the American experience, as well as the fluid state of identity – the leaps through time, the collision of cultures – that mark our modern life.

The printed book, Dreams from My Father, written by a then-unknown lawyer, was published for the first time by Times Books, New York, in 1995. When the author began his political career and won the 2004 primary elections as a Democratic senator from Illinois, the book was republished with a revised preface. In 2005 Random House Audio in New York published Dreams from My Father as an audiobook in an abridged version. As bonus material the audiobook also contains Obama’s legendary speech to the Democratic National Convention in 2004. In 2006 the audiobook got a Grammy for best spoken album, and it remains an international bestseller both as a printed book and an audiobook.

The printed version of Dreams from My Father consists of 464 pages structured in a preface, introduction, epilogue, and 19 chapters divided into three main parts: Origins, Chicago, and Kenya. The audiobook has a total playing time of seven and a half hours. The six CDs consist of a total of 107 MP3 files (the last four comprise the live recording of the senator’s speech to the Democratic National Convention) that are automatically named according to the first words in the file. The original structure of the book into sections and chapters is not clear from the CD box, the individual discs, or the audio reading.

Dreams from My Father portrays a man’s search for meaning and direction in life as the son of a black African father and a white American mother. Chapter one begins in New York, where Barack Obama gets a call from his Aunt Jane in Nairobi, who tells him that his father, Barack Obama, Sr., has been killed in a car accident. In the presentation of the aunt’s voice Obama raises his voice and speaks with a clear African accent; this change of accents and intonation is a recurrent feature in the reading of the book. Although the author had his doubts about the re-release of the book in 2004, after he had stepped into politics, he states in the reading of the preface:

I cannot honestly say, however, that the voice in this book is not mine – that I would tell the story much differently today than I did ten years ago, even if certain passages have proven to be inconvenient politically, the grist for pundit commentary and opposition research.

The concept of ‘voice’ here refers to the implicit narrator of the book, an intention inherent in the text itself, but in the audiobook the sound of Obama’s physical voice adds a certain authenticity to the text. The reservation evident in the quotation above became even more relevant after the author became president of the United States. The context in which the audiobook is read has changed; the book is no longer simply performed by the author himself, but by a publicly known and high-profile international politician whom people all over the world know from television and other media. This context influences the audio reading experience of Dreams from My Father, and the complex role of voice(s) represents one of the aspects that we are investigating in the present volume. The voice is an implicit intention of a text or novel, but in the case of the audiobook this intention is being interpreted by a physical and performing voice.¹

AUDIOBOOKS BECOMING DIGITAL

Although the audiobook is not a new medium, it has recently found itself in a new position, which is treated and questioned in this volume. But what characterizes this new position?

The audiobook has historically been associated with children, the dyslexic, or the visually handicapped, regardless of whether the media technology has been reel-to-reel tapes, vinyl, cassette tapes, or CDs. Thus, the audiobook has been considered compensatory and treated in terms of its ability to make shortcuts or overcome insufficiencies.

Like the printed book the audiobook is a one-to-many medium, distributing standardized content to an anonymous audience. At the same time, however, it is a new, highly individualized, and mobile medium, adapted to individual needs and uses and with interactive possibilities still latent. Relative to the development of the printed book, beginning with Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1455, the development of the audiobook was a byproduct of the general mediatization of the book, branching out when Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 and facilitating a communicative separation in time and space of the oral tradition of reading aloud (cf. Walter J. Ong’s concept of secondary orality [1982] to which we will return in chapter seven). In fact, it was for the purpose of recording speech, not music, that Edison invented the phonograph (Rubery 2011, 3).

The technological development of the audiobook began with spoken word recordings. Not many of these survive from before 1914, and not until the 1930s were novels recorded in full length in Britain and the United States (Rubery 2011, 5). Even though it became possible to listen to audiobooks on heavy reel-to-reel audio tapes after the Second World War, up until the introduction of audio cassettes in the 1970s the primary medium for audiobooks was vinyl records. The term audiobook was first introduced in relation to audio cassettes (Rubery 2011, 8), and as a result of the mobility offered by the Walkman and the integrated tape decks in most cars, audio cassettes quickly became the preferred medium for audiobooks. In the 1980s the digital compact disc slowly began to take over, and since 2002 audiobooks have been available for download (and later streaming) from the Internet through compressed digital formats such as MP3.

The hardware of the audiobook has over the years become more flexible and more mobile. To use Matthew Rubery’s example: While an unabridged recording of Tolstoy’s War and Peace once required 119 records, 45 cassettes, or 50 compact discs (Rubery 2011, 9), today’s MP3 file has made the audiobook weightless and not limited to one delivery technology. Although the compact disc is still an important player on the market, in recent years a lot of audiobook readers have moved from physical CDs to the more practical computerized sources – a development shared with printed books, films, and music.

The object of our study is closely linked to the user perspective, and therefore the flexibility offered by the MP3 format seems crucial. In continuation of this we have focused our research on the digital format. The user perspective also helps us to overcome the less fruitful distinction between old and new media. Our starting point will be the medium as framed by technology and user possibilities, and from here we are interested in describing and highlighting the audiobook experience per se. The present study of the audiobook thus focuses on how technology creates distinct possibilities for use. The opportunity for flexible use additionally attracts new user groups, and from here new modes of usage and experience emerge.

As the new mobile technology in computer-based smartphones has made audiobooks more available as well as more user-friendly than ever before, we find evidence that the target groups of audiobooks are changing significantly due to the increased flexibility and prevalence of the medium. On 7 August 2012 Amazon in the United Kingdom announced that the sale of e-books had now surpassed the sale of printed books (Bay 2012) – an example of how we find ourselves on the threshold of a broader prevalence of new digitized formats for books, with e-readers like iPads and Kindles seriously challenging the monopoly of the paper book. An often forgotten e-book that has contributed to this development is the audiobook, which made the book electronic and digital long before e-readers. American surveys indicate that the digital audiobook is currently making rapid gains in popularity (Independent Publisher 2013). Over the past few years new portable delivery technologies and distribution channels have radically expanded both audiobook use and its user groups, resulting in what we call the digital renaissance of the audiobook. Compact formats like MP3 and online streaming offer a degree of flexibility that appeals to entirely new user groups. Today audiobook users include anyone with a smartphone, which makes audiobooks a potential ‘mass media’ (Alter 2013). We believe that these changes call for new consideration and investigation of the audiobook within the general research fields of mediatization and digitalization of the book.

In this book we define audiobook as a sound recording of a book that is performed by a professional narrator (often an actor) or the author. This can also be done by a synthetic voice or by amateurs, but these will not be included in the present study. This definition marks a demarcation and excludes books made only for audio or recordings of other written texts such as newspaper articles. As we study the audiobook in its current movement toward a broader use we do not study the audiobook as educational aid, but rather focus broadly on fiction, which is the most popular genre. The audiobook is, as the name indicates, closely related to its written source, the printed book. In continuation hereof it might seem relevant to study the audiobook from a historical technological viewpoint as an interpretation of the printed book, but audiobook reading also draws upon radio drama and the oral tradition surrounding reading aloud (Rubery 2011, Kozloff 1995). Thus, we find it at least as relevant to base this study on a discussion of the audiobook as partaker in the culture of mobile sound media, where small formats and online streaming seem to appeal to new user groups and flexible use. With this volume we ask to what extent the use of audiobooks should primarily be investigated as a new type of reading experience or as an example of mobile listening, related to everyday experience in, for instance, an urban environment or an exercising practice. Our answer to this will be to stress the need for genuine ambiguity on this matter, which is underlined by the interdisciplinary character of the volume.

RESEARCHING AUDIOBOOKS

Research on audiobooks is rare, and as an everyday phenomenon it is more or less unexplored. However, some recent publications have referred directly and in detail to the audiobook, for instance Whitten (2002), Bednar (2010), Koepnick (2013), and Colbjørnsen (2015), but the most thorough study of the phenomenon so far still seems to be: Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies, edited by Matthew Rubery (2011). This volume reflects a number of historical notions of the audiobook, discussing the status of the oral in relation to literature and also pinpointing a number of normative conceptions that seem to cling to the audiobook, for instance the idea that “reading aloud is for children” or that audiobook listening is a “threat to the concentrated attitude of deep reading” (Rubery 2011, 3). Rubery points to a number of prejudices that have stuck to the audiobook as a phenomenon, possibly stemming from a general conception of literature as threatened by new technology, and he correctly argues that oral reading is much older than silent reading. He also pinpoints the need for understanding audiobook listening as a different, though not necessarily less valid, form of reading – an argument we will unfold and qualify in the present volume. Although Rubery’s edited volume mentions the media aspect, we find that so far neither the potential of the media aspect nor that of the technology aspect has been sufficiently described. Nor have we been able to find a systematized approach to sound as the audiobook’s medial condition – a fact which we will pursue and expand upon.

In the present volume we frame audiobook listening as an everyday experience that spurs new reading practices linked to mobile audio listening. This may take place in different situations: in the garden, on the train, when jogging or driving, or before falling asleep. These situations will frame our analyses of contemporary audiobook use. Our overall goal is, as already mentioned, to discuss the digital audiobook in a double perspective: on the one hand, as a remediation of literature, that is, as another literary format, and, on the other hand, as an auditory mediated experience in everyday life comparable to the experience of music, radio, audio guides, or even audio therapy – a popular phenomenon that is part of digital, mobile audio culture in a mixed-media environment offering intimacy and sociability.

With this approach we aim to establish dialogue between sound studies and media studies, comparative literature, aesthetics, and sociology. Our main objective is to challenge the historical notion of audiobook listening as a compensatory or second-rate experience and instead examine the use of audiobooks as a contemporary first-class listening experience.

We have structured the study as a qualitative investigation that combines theoretical and analytical approaches grounded in a postphenomenological position. Quoting Don Ihde on this matter, “postphenomenology is a modified phenomenology hybrid” (2009, 23), modified in the sense that Ihde, by integrating a material perspective, represents a pragmatic way of avoiding the problems of understanding phenomenology as a subjectivist philosophy. The fundamental premise of our work is a phenomenological understanding of embodiment and human active bodily perception as a dynamic understanding of a life world. Postphenomenology, in this sense, finds a way “to probe and analyze the role of technologies in social, personal, and cultural life” (Ihde 2009, 23). To clarify the current use and experience of audiobooks we draw on a sample of qualitative data including qualitative interviews, notes from conversations with audiobook users, published descriptions from blogs and newspaper articles, and case studies of certain user groups or audiobooks. A number of exemplary ‘scenarios’ have emerged from these data, and throughout the volume they will, together with the interviews, act as an exemplifying grid supporting our overall arguments. The scenarios involve different activities and include a mailman at work, a person working in the garden, a commuter, and a runner and will throughout the volume help us illustrate and clarify our theoretical arguments alongside discussions of specific audiobooks, both in the analysis of the development from printed text to audio and in the discussion of the role of the performing narrator’s voice.

Due to the national and cultural contexts of the authors, this volume is written into a globalized, Western media culture, but from a Danish perspective. The interviews and case studies are Danish, but they nevertheless represent audiobook use in Europe and America as well. The audiobook examples include Paul Auster, Barack Obama, Jennifer Egan, and Virginia Woolf. We have conducted interviews with a Danish publisher and a Danish/European distributor, which supplement surveys by the American Audio Publishers Association. The focus of this book, however, is on the experience and use of audiobooks and not on institutional aspects and the huge national variations in markets, suppliers, and technology.

A Commuter

When Tom leaves work in the afternoon he has a long train ride ahead of him accompanied by other busy commuters. It is a regular part of his everyday life, a prolongation of his working hours, but also a break or an intersection between two life forms, both of which make certain demands on him. He is in his late thirties and has a relatively challenging job as a surgeon. At home he is expected to spend time with his family and talk to his kids, as well as prepare dinner. While commuting Tom regularly streams audiobooks on his smartphone, and the experience makes him calm down and somehow perceive time differently; it becomes an everyday interlude especially earmarked for him. Although the commute rep...