The Appeals of eBooks and Audiobooks

 I love The Lord of the Rings. But as a fan, I feel like I have to own up to a particularly embarrassing confession: I have never read the books. I have tried on multiple occasions to hold Fellowship in my hands and let myself get carried away to Middle-earth, but the very robust and grandiose verbiage that gives the series its depth can be its own roadblock.

Though I haven't read the books, I have listened to them on audiobook at least 3 times through in my lifetime, with surely more to come. This I think is one of the great strengths of an audiobook. Not only are they convenient for multitasking, but great audiobooks with effective narrators (and perhaps even sound effects and music) can bring a book alive like a spoken-word tale. The emphasis and drama in the reading can help give the punch needed for climactic scene, or the subtle whispers of something meant to be unheard. If overdone, yes, the narration can be too cheesy (or way too lifeless and dry) for the listener to continue, and a good book may suffer for it. I've heard some wild voices from Star Wars book narrators for alien characters that make me laugh too much to focus on their very sad tragic backstory. But in the context of a series like that, I think it can come back around to being charming. Fan-made narrations can be cringe worthy as well, but I think there's an appeal for the auteurism; they made the thing because they wanted to make it.

eBooks are a different story for me, though. The same focus problems I can have in reading a physical book are compounded by an ebook. It's easy for me to tab out to look up a word or a reference, get lost in a video from there. But I know what a lot of people enjoy about ebooks is the massive amount of access that something like Kindle Unlimited or the various comics Unlimited subscriptions can give. It becomes not only more convenient to select and acquire these titles compared to going to a store or library, but the digital library is much more expansive than most local locations. The subscription fees to publishers for public libraries to have access to those digital libraries is advantageous to the publisher, but from a patron's perspective, the amount of choice is a major appeal for digital reading.

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