First, I don’t have the patience for them.

Second, they are usually poorly done.

Third, it’s not *reading*, dammit.

Fourth, few authors when giving readings of their work are as compelling as the printed words.

Go on. You sit still for the unabridged reading of Les Miserables. Suuuure.

I find that the best and most intensive way for me to “read” is by integrating my audio and visual senses. I listen to an audiobook while the corresponding electronic text is displayed on an internet connected tablet computer. A gifted audio actor can provide pronunciations, accents, and cadences that are not directly represented in the plain text. The text reader must construct this information internally based on dialect knowledge that is often imperfect. Alternatively, the reader may remain oblivious to this level of perception and may engage in a quasi-symbolic cognitive processing that normalizes and strips text of audio qualities.

Fine narrators infuse emotional colorations into text that enliven and deepen it. The text becomes a collaboration between the author and the audio narrator. If there is no external narrator then the reader himself must become an internal narrator. This does not mean that the reader must hear an internal voice; it simply means that the reader must assemble the full meaning of the text without audible clues. There is a danger that the characters may become emotionally flattened and coarsely prototypical. A Procrustean reader may coerce each character into a template that is a minor variant of the self. Of course, a poor narrator may provide a spurious, misleading, and grating audio overlayment.

When I hear a narrator using an unfamiliar word or term then I can rapidly search for it using an internet browser by cutting and pasting from the electronic text (or simply clicking). A reference to Brancusi’s “Bird in Space” that I recently encountered motivated me to quickly and successfully search for images of the corresponding sculpture family. When the term “Vanderdecken” was used as an adjective I determined that it referred to Hendrik van der Decken who was the captain of “The Flying Dutchman”, the famous ghost ship. These terms along with the following: binnacle, cataphoresis, plantigrade, digitigrade, coaming, titivate, and bumbershoot were found in the “The Wanderer” by Fritz Leiber, a novel that won the Hugo award in Science Fiction in 1965. In each case an internet search was rewarding.

The combination of audio with an electronic text in a connected-online framework provides the most comprehensive “literary” experience. An internet search engine is a potent analytical tool for finding supplemental explications that are absent in the audio stream and the plain text. In some cases this additional information is essential to fully understanding and enjoying the text. Of course, this is not a “shorthand” method for reading despite the presence of audio. It is slow, and I do not typically “read” this way. However, if I wish to learn from an author and attempt to improve my own writing skills I do try to read this way.

To conclude this short note here is one last point showing the value of audio. Consider the following passage excerpted from the main article above:

Nevertheless, it seems to me that audiobooks have developed a generally sexy and sophisticated cache for literary types that other shorthand ways to literature typically lack.

If an audiobook version of the text above was available then the listener probably would have suggested substituting “cachet” for “cache”. The pronunciation provided by the audio would highlight the discordant syllable count.

I have, however, found that proofreading at Distributed Proofreaders, which is slower than just reading, does increase my involvement with a text. Forced to slow down (by comparing text to image and then by scanning the spellcheck display) I see things that I might not have seen in my usual headlong rush through a text.

I imagine that listening to a book might have this effect for some folks. Doesn’t for me.

My guess is that most writers of books these days aren’t consciously thinking of how they will sound when read out loud–which is one reason why public readings by writers can be so deadly dull and uninteresting. It’s not just that they are poor readers of their own work–which they often are; it’s that their work was never meant to be heard in the first place.

I wonder, though, whether the growing popularity of audiobooks will change that. Will writers start writing precisely with a view toward the fact that their books will be sold both to be read and to be heard.

I listened to the audiobook version of Carl Hiaasen’s *Skinny Dip* recently, for example. *No way* would Mr Hiaasen ever have written that first page the way he did if he were telling the tale aloud. The sentence structure is all wrong for the spoken word. It probably ‘reads’ on a page better, because it was written on a page by a writer who couldn’t ever have read the work back aloud to himself, and he wrote it to be read.

Listening to audiobooks is not reading, no. There is an additional performance factor in telling a story out loud that can never happen in text on a page. The oral storyteller controls pace in a way the writer of printed words never can. Paragraphing really has no place in oral storytelling other than as one of the many aspects of performing the tale.

But audiobooks also are not oral storytelling in the traditional sense. Traditionally, with his audience right before him providing him with feedback (yawns, gasps, laughter, applause, rapt silence) the oral storyteller could adjust his performance. The audio book to the oral tale is as the movie to the theatrical performance.

But the rest of the ‘reading can’t be listening’ seems just more of the effete snobbery that shows how many writers want to kill off literature in its entirety, by keeping it as ‘pure’ as the blood of the Hapsburg line…