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Audiobooks don't feel like reading to me. It's more like watching television. As in, "I watched 120 hours of Netflix last year!", and thus not something that
by jasonkester 9y ago
Audiobooks don't feel like reading to me. It's more like watching television. As in, "I watched 120 hours of Netflix last year!", and thus not something that gives the same satisfaction.
A good book is something you want to take slowly and really read. Digging in and unpacking the meaning from interesting turns of phrase. I just don't get that from listening. I need to see the words.
Maybe for history, textbooks, or mindless pageturners it could be useful. But for a capital-B Book, no, that doesn't do it for me.
- fsloth 9y agoI think this is your personal preference. Perhaps you've suffered poor recordings? I've found a good book, when read by a proficient voice to a well produced recording - is still a good book. Early literature was all based on rote learning and spoken tongue. We still have some of those works left from preliterate times. Socrates, Homer, etc. Although, 'pre-literate' literature does sound a bit self contradicting.
- lsc 9y agoso I'm a couple comments up; I do think that audiobooks can be better for some things... but even when the recording is so good you might be able to call it better than the book, it's just... a really different experience from reading a book. As to early literature, I just got done reading Emily Wilson's new translation of the Odyssey. she goes into that a little in the introduction, about the difference between something you recite and something you read, and about how the odyssey is sort of in-between those two things; clearly it wasn't just homer taking dictation, but it also clearly does contain some artifacts unique to an oral storytelling tradition.