Seth has a post today about why he thinks audiobooks are not a booming business. He says that the authors receive very little compensation, therefore promotion is lacking. He throws in the hassles of maintaining a CD or cassette library in stock, but I only use the kind where you can download as files to your smartphone or music player.
But, he mentions that he is ten times more likely to get an e-mail about a book from folks he use audio books.
Then you have the eBooks. I remember hearing Cory Doctorow talking at a Google book publishers
conference at the New York Public Library about how some people are
just "pervy for paper," and he thinks this is why digital or eBooks are
not popular. His sci-fi stories are free to download because of the Creative Commons licensing, and I've been reading them on my Treo 700p.The great thing is that you never need to find decent lighting to read by. The screen is amazingly bright (and adjustable) as well as high in resolution, so you don't end up with eye strain.
I read The DaVinci Code and another Dan Brown novel on the Treo with no problem. It's the perfect way to read on a commute. You can bookmark sections and annotate for future reference. This is the main thing I don't like about the audiobook format. I use the eReader and MobiPocket software.
I'm now reading The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston I downloaded from eReader. It starts with the anthrax deaths post 9/11, then segues into the possible threat of the use of smallpox for a terrorist attack. It was supposedly eradicated from the face of the earth, now stored in two laboratories, one at the CDC in Atlanta, the other in Russia. Now we learn that Soviets produced mass quantities when it was developing this as a biological weapon, and now is unaccounted for. It is so contagious, all you need to do is to inhale a few virus particles to become infected, and those shedding virus have only flu-like symptoms for days until they develop the characteristic skin pox. Very scary stuff.
However, with the audiobooks, if you find a book you love (for me it's The Great Influenza by John Barry), it's a pleasure to re-listen for hours as you stroll through the city or do your chores at home. I eventually picked up the hardcover from the library just so I could skip to the sections that I wanted to reread, and looks at the archival photos.
I hope it's not a spoiler by saying that it's metafiction, but it is complex and is the type of book that you want to discuss with others about what actually happened. Word is, the movie is true to the book, and has gotten good reviews.
