In a time where technology is very prevalent in our lives, the way we function day to day is changing. The way people interact with each other, the way people drive, the way people share, the way people date, has all been alternated by technology. One aspect of our lives is changing so much it will affect us far into the future: the way people read.
The Atlantic published an article recently that shed some light onto how authors feel about audiobooks. People cannot only listen to books, as oppose to reading them, but they can increase the speed of how fast they listen to it. Some software has made is possible to listen to books at 1.5 times or even double speed. Not only can this software speed up the audio, some can even remove “unnecessary” pauses between words and sentences. Author Ashlee Vance described it as hooking your brain up to a machine and downloading at the best transfer rate available.
To me, this takes the pleasure and romance out of reading for enjoyment. Listening to an audiobook at a fast speed just seems to be making a task out of a book—listening to it at the quickest speed to be done with it. As Vance said, downloading at the best transfer rate available. This takes away the relaxation of casually reading a book at the beach, or being curled up during a rainy day with a good book. It makes a task out of something that is meant to be relaxing.
Besides my opinion on the matter, studies have shown that people are more likely to be distracted when listening than when reading. This same study found that people who read a passage rather than listening to it have a better memory than those who were listening to that passage being read out loud.
Authors spend months and even years perfecting every sentence and every phrase in their book with the intention that it will be read by someone who is reading it for enjoyment, not listening to it at two times the speed so it can be checked off the to-do list. Audio books are taking away the pleasure of being curled up on the couch, enjoying every word, and replacing it with chipmunk voices reading the book out loud while you are half-listening and half-trying to do about three other things at the same time. Even if it takes longer, reading a book is how the author intended for their work to be enjoyed.
