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Audiobooks and the Reassertion of Orality: Walter J. Ong and Others Revisited
... A poor reading of a text can negatively impact a listener's opinion of a book. 44 Though narrators usually only receive a book or galley about one week in advance of recording, they are expected to conduct their own research before production commences. 45 To prepare for the Jacky Faber series, Katherine Kellgren worked with a singing coach to ensure that songs and sea shanties were accurate and sounded appropriate sung in both male and female character voices. ...
Mr. Gutenberg came along and suddenly we had the book. But long before that, we had the oral traditions, we had storytellers sitting down and weaving a plot and presenting characters,” so says adult author Michael Lamb in a National Public Radio interview.Indeed, the power of a good story is hard to deny, and the unprecedented growth of audiobooks in recent years, with marked increases among children and young adult titles suggests that this oral tradition is still very much valued by children and adults alike.Given the continued interest in this form of information receiving and a renewed focus on listening within education, it is important for librarians to know the history of audiobooks and recognize components that make audiobooks distinct.
How can reading for sharing in reading groups lead to a fuller grasp of not only the self but also the self as part of society? How can a collectively constructed understanding of the self in society lead to a less alienated, more authentic public persona? This chapter examines the individual and social dynamics of discussing literature in public reading groups. It elucidates the productive and transformative interface between inward meaning making and the outward search for comprehension and acknowledgement. The multilayered dynamics of reading for sharing seem particularly present in open, public literary discussion groups, where the participants are strangers to each other and are freer to practice an authentic public persona. This study’s two in-depth empirical analyses are drawn from two shared reading events—one online and the other physical—during which a group of strangers listened to and discussed James Joyce’s “Eveline” and Jan Kristoffer Dale’s “Laborer’s Hands.” The research is based on long-term participant experience in eight different public library reading groups, including shared reading sessions, in Oslo, Norway, and digital Shared Reading sessions during the Covid-19 lockdown, in addition to interviews with 70 participants, aged 15–88 years.
This open access book promotes the idea that all media types are multimodal and that comparing media types, through an intermedial lens, necessarily involves analysing these multimodal traits. The collection includes a series of interconnected articles that illustrate and clarify how the concepts developed in Elleström’s influential article The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) can be used for methodical investigation and interpretation of media traits and media interrelations. The authors work with a wide range of old and new media types that are traditionally investigated through limited, media-specific concepts. The publication is a significant contribution to interdisciplinary research, advancing the frontiers of conceptual as well as practical understanding of media interrelations. This is the first of two volumes. It contains Elleström’s revised article and six other contributions focusing especially on media integration: how media products and media types are combined and merged in various ways.
The development of digital media technologies like the MP3 file and the smartphone has changed the status of the audiobook from being a by-product of the printed book to being a mass medium in its own right. This chapter takes a context and user perspective on audiobooks and asks the fundamental question: to what extent can one say that one ‘reads’ an audiobook? Based on the Danish author Helle Helle’s novel Ned til hundene ( Down to the Dogs , 2008), the authors discuss how the audiobook experience as a whole can be analysed regarding ‘technological framing’, ‘reading situations’ and ‘the performing voice’. They also investigate audiobook reading in relation to the experience of time and depth.
The talking book offers a case study in the transition of cultural forms into new media. As the technology for recording books has developed from sound recording into the downloading of books from the internet, the encounter between new technologies and literary texts has implications for cultural and literary theory. This article offers an analysis of the talking book, with a particular emphasis on the novel. Although books on tape did arouse some media interest around the 75th anniversary of the production of the first recorded novel, Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, there has to date been no academic research on the growing phenomenon of books on tape. This article begins by charting a history of the talking book, from the first tape recordings for the Royal National Institute of the Blind to the impact of the MP3 player and the iPod. It makes use of Raymond Williams' work on television and of Stuart Hall and Paul De Gay's case study of the Sony Walkman as offering methodologies for the analysis of new technologies as sites of cultural contest, and develops this work into a study of the recorded book. The article also employs a textual analysis of the catalogues and websites used to promote the talking book as a commodity. The study demonstrates that the talking book, as with other forms of cultural encounters with new technologies, builds on already existing categories of literary and cultural capital.