By Christine Yunn-Yu Sun
For those who are used to reading written words, listening to spoken words via audiobooks can be an exciting adventure.
Audiobooks offer an immersive experience that can help conventional readers better connect to the content. When a book is read out loud, each listener feels like the narrator is communicating directly to them. This encourages them to be attentive, which in turn helps improve their concentration on, and comprehension of, the content.
Audiobooks have an emotional appeal as well. A talented narrator is capable of bringing a book’s characters to life by replicating their tones and inflections, throughout the content and especially in dialogues. This helps create a feeling of relevancy and meaningfulness, allowing the listener to better identify with the characters and their experiences.
The most commonly acknowledged advantages of audiobooks are that they help us better manage our time, build critical listening skills, and improve pronunciation and fluency. In Australia and other parts of the world, audiobooks are frequently used while driving or commuting, performing repetitive tasks/chores, and during physical exercise sessions.
While audiobooks allow us to multi-task and are suitable for both the time-poor and the time-rich, they were born back in the 1930s out of the need to serve the blind and visually impaired adults and children, as well as those with physical impairments that prevent the reading of standard print materials.
In 1952, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas sat down to record his selected poems on a long playing vinyl record, beginning with “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”. The 45 minute recording went on to become one of his most widely known works, and is credited as the “seed” of the audiobook industry today.
Starting in the 1970s, audiobooks gained considerable popularity thanks to the invention and wide adoption of cassette tapes, as well as the introduction of small and cheap portable players such
as the Walkman.
Then, in the 1990s and 2000s, technological advances enhanced the prevalence of Internet usage, prompting insatiable consumer demands for faster download speeds, smarter compressed audio formats, and smaller, lighter and cheaper media playing devices. Far superior than their predecessors on cassettes and CDs, today’s audiobooks in MP3 and other digital formats allow instant download access from online libraries of unlimited size.
In 2020, it was estimated that 6.6 million Australians had listened to audiobooks, 55% of millennials had already listened to audiobooks, and older generations were also getting onboard. In November 2022, it was reported that 37% of Australian audiobook consumers began listening to audiobooks within the past 12 months. In comparison, 32% had been listening for at least 3 years or more, and 15% had been enjoying audiobooks for more than 6 years.
Narration remains crucial in audiobooks because the narrator not only tells stories but also embodies different characters. It’s an “acting gig” as described by award-winning audiobook producer Kathryn Lambrix, To tap in the oral tradition of storytelling – and a rich resource of human voice performance – why not give audiobooks a try?
