Are audiobooks on the same level as reading?

>>9531815
same level in what?

>>9531815
Can't really annotate an audiobook, anon. They're for people who want stories read to them on their commute. They aren't conducive to fully understanding the text.

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Pros:
>Does not take full concentration, thus allows for multitasking.
>Can be on your phone, so easy to store and carry around with you.
>No paper books to have to store if you're not into that kind of thing
Cons:
>Lower reading retention.
>Can't get as into the work(might be a personal thing, but I find the act of reading to be more enjoyable than audiobooks.
>No paper books to store, if you're into that sort of thing.
>makes you a pleb if you do it.

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Odd. I hate audiobooks, but I listen to podcasts. Am I a hypocrite?

Audiobooks are the bomb. Reading is more in depth but not as enjoyable because i cant lift while reading, like i can with audiobooks.

>>9531853
If you hate audiobooks because you think they're somehow less intellectual than reading, yes

A well performed audio book adds a dimension to the text.

>>9531815
I listen to the audiobook first then buy the book and read it seriously.

>>9531829
>annotate
>>>/school/

It depends on if the narrator smacks his fucking lips or not.

LIKE FUCKING OPEN YOUR MOUTH WITHOUT MAKING A SOUND ITS NOT HARD YOU PIECE OF SHIT FUCKING FUCK.

>>9531815
is listening to piano the same as playing it?

I love taking long walks or hikes listening to audiobooks, but their quality varies based on the reader, his or her performance and how well the text lends itself to an orator.
A great audiobook sounds like a well made radio play or an one-person show without modifying or sacrificing anything from the source. Bad ones tend to sound as monotone and soulless as if you'd have ran the text trough a text-to-speech synthesis, totally lacking in any character you would have given it in your head if you were reading it normally.

>>9531853
>tfw you don't even live up to literally lifestyle meme man

>>9531853

You'd be a hypocrite if you liked reading podcast transcripts.

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>>9531815

i hope that is at least a terrible book because otherwise i am quite pic related

>>9532776
It appears to be a textbook.

>>9532336
Completely different wtf are you on about

>>9531815
>the life of a lit major.jpg

I enjoy listening to Lovecraft on audiobook

>>9531815
I'm not sure what level you are referencing.
If you're asking whether the same level of literacy is required to listen to an audiobook as opposed to reading a book then the answer is obviously "no". You can listen to an audibook while being totally illiterate.
If you are asking whether there is access to the same level of content, then the answer is "mostly yes". The words of the book do not change hwever any stylistic rendering of the words is lost (e.g. The Mouse's Tale in Alice in Wonderland).
If you are asking whether you will achieve the same level of retention with one as with the other then it may depend on you (maybe you like being read to) and the way you listen to the audiobook (pausing to let concepts sink in perhaps).

I myself do not like audiobooks. My mind always wanders and the book tends to become background noise.

Absolutely not. Audiobooks are convenient, but it's better to read in any circumstance that doesn't involve multi-tasking (driving, working out, etc.). Audiobooks dictate a pace without compromise, robbing you of the opportunity to reflect on what you're presumably paying attention to.

I guess it depends on the type of book, though. I tend to listen to more non-fiction with audiobooks; history, economics, politics.

Audiobooks are great if you are on autopilot. Autopilot means that you don't need to think to do that task, like walking and driving the same damn route to work. If it is a story book great. No good if you want to take notes, annotate and simply shit if it is a reference book.

I want to listen to crime and punishment ( in original Russian)
The narrator is amazing too, just don't know if it's better to read or to listen.

It'd sound weird to say "yeah I read that book" when in reality I listened to it.

>>9531815
You can't go back and check something as easily and it's easier to makes notes from a physical book. Audio books are good if you want to finish a book quickly.

>>9531853
no, youre just middlebrow. podcasts, excepting a few, are snl skit, new yorker magazine, pop up tapas restaurant, npr-tier

The Audio Book is above it, for Writing is but a commodifying convenience, and mutilation of Speech in the name of Distributive Ease, unnecessary now.

>>9533579
Writing is an aberrant simplification of actual speech developed mostly for practical and banal purposes - keeping records, etc. Before sound recording and playback technologies developed it was however necessary for the wide-scale dissemination of poems and stories. Now, however, it can safely be trashed. A book is soulless and inherently inferior to the humanity of its audio counterpart.

Audiobooks are for everyone. Look at actual research. There's tons of it.
http://www.readingrockets.org/article/benefits-audiobooks-all-readers

>there are people who listen to audiobooks so they can multitask
nu /lit/ everyone

>>9533607
Writing allows us to develop ideas that would be impossible to keep in our heads if we relied on old methods of storytelling from memory. Even an audiobook is going to be written down first both to efficiently develop the story and to give the narrator a script to read from.

Anyway, I don't think narrators bringing a book to life is much different from your internal monologue doing the same thing. They're usually very good at it and are enjoyable but they're at best an equivalent substitute for books.

For entertainment, sure. But if you actually want to learn something, then you need to read paper books and annotate as you read (making highlights on a kindle doesn't count faggots).

>>9532336
Is listening to a piano the same as reading the sheet music?

>>9533911
I think you'll have bigger problems with audiobooks if you're that much of a pseud.

>>9533308
You still read it if you listened to it.

>>9534166
One could argue that sheet music is just potential music waiting to be actualized (i.e executed). The same does not hold for novels.

>>9534644
One could go for a nice swim in a septic tank.

>>9532322
>>>/yeah/
also i want to be a better writer, so...

>>9534615
what ?

bumping again

>>9531845
>Does not take full concentration
It kinda does though. If you get distracted by the smallest thing, you realize that you have no idea what the narrator is talking about though. Then you have to go back.

>>9535768
This, people think you can multi-talk while listening to an audiobook, if it's a novel you can't you have to relax like you do with books.

>>9531853
which pods u listen fem?

>>9535945
bill burr

ask Borges, by the end he was fucking blind

>>9535945
Sleepy Cast (although I never listened to season 2)
Serial
If I Were you
We're Alive
Stewart the Sock's Podcast
Pizza Party Podcast
The Grandma's Virginity Podcast
Knifepoint Horror
The Official Podcast
The Andy Daly Podcast

>>9536381
Add Snap Judgement with Glynn Washington to this. That man has a delicious voice.

Bumping again boys

Is it worth listening to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin or should i read them?

I still don't get the difference..

I love audiobooks to death

the right audiobook is like being in heaven for a few hours. the only comparable feeling is cuddling in bed with someone after sex. I just let go and let the other person's voice carry me into a dream world. if I could never listen to good audiobooks again I'd probably kill myself. just thinking about listening again makes me so happy I could cry.

unfortunately, this only works with stuff at about a high school reading level, because otherwise, I miss too much of what is being said. probably what most people would call a page-turner, which is exactly the sort of near-unconscious reading/listening experience I live for.

>>9538461
So can you answer this
>>9538447

>>9538461
While this is totally accurate, the amount of audiobooks I download that actually are good? Fucking 1 in 50, if that. Libravox? A joke. It's in the public domain? It's a joke. Paying for an audiobook? Fuck no, I don't pay for my books unless I'm getting a permanent physical copy. Book is read by a woman? Terrible, they don't have resonant voices or good timbre, ever. Pynchon audiobooks suck, DFW's are only good if they're read by the dead man himself. I once listened to an audiobook by a british guy who sounded similar to David Attenborough, the guy who narrates the BBC Planet Earth. It was In Search of Lost Time. Since that time I've been chasing the audiobook dragon.

Please, someone point me to something that will blow me away. The problem is that even if the book is great it needs to be a good speaker with a good voice to even get past the first chapter

Audiobooks are performances, and should be regarded as one-man plays. As such, only works written in the first person are capable of being made into good audiobooks, with painfully few exceptions. This category includes works where the narrator is his own character, with individuality and opinions despite his non-presence in the actual plot of the novel.

As a performance shows a specific interpretation of the text, in everything from cadence to character to basic structure, its quality depends entirely on the performer. No matter how good the work, if the reader is shit, the entire thing will be shit. With the quality of the work interpreted having already been established, the performance itself becomes the medium to be judged for quality.

For instance: Jeremy Irons' reading of Lolita is the perfect audiobook. Nothing can match it. Irons (in addition to the fact that he is a fantastic actor and knows the craft of delivery inside and out) obviously studied the novel down to its smallest mechanic subtleties, taking time not only to portray an accurate overall personality for Humbert, but to show his specific and infinitely varying moods, affectations, and emphases. Best of all, everything he does is apparent within the prose: Nabokov put it all there, and Irons gives every subtlety its due voice.

This is why >>9538512 is correct in saying Pynchon audiobooks are shit. His writing is simply not conducive to the format. Voice, character, and tone are not consistent enough to be read aloud by one person, or by ten. This can be applied to many similar authors.

Joyce, though, represents a point of contention--he does have an intrinsically oral quality to some of his works, but 99.9...% of performers are simply not talented enough to handle his cadence or sentence structure. Donal Donnelly is the exception because he is slow, attentive, and provides enough variance in character voices that most of the subtleties Joyce lays out can be grasped. Not all, of course.
Once again, audiobooks are not books, and therefore don't provide any of the benefits of the visual aspects of a work. These include representation of some specific stylistic choices; ease of reference of the rest of the book, including footnotes, end-notes, citations, etc. (although this is somewhat remedied by note-taking and time-stamping); and just getting to see the structural makeup of good writing, which is more influential on an individual's own work than simply hearing the words spoken. If you want to learn to write better, then reading is a must. If audiobooks influence the specific craft of any art, it is acting.

To address some of the undue criticism in this thread: you can always pause when a distraction comes along, as well as to take notes, mark times, etc. That's a poor critique, and simply a reflection on the quality of the listener. Also: re-listening to specific chapters, sections, speeches, even sentences for clarity is completely viable. You do have a rewind button.

>>9538447
Depends on the work and the narrator. But generally, yes to Dostoyevsky, especially Notes from the Underground. His narrators are either specific characters, or voice their opinions enough to be practically considered characters.

I imagine Eugene Onegin would be a phenomenal audiobook if read right: it is a single character, a single voice, and is in fucking verse. Should be phenomenal. Can't speak for the rest of his works.

Tolstoy should be just fine, as well.

>>9538512
see >>9538753
Lolita is a fucking masterwork.

>>9538783
>Lolita is a fucking masterwork.
already read it thrice, gib me something new.

I can reccomend mine, all availble by torrents.
In Search of Lost Time - read by a british guy. If it's the right one you'll know, it'll blow you away.
The Best American Travel Writing 2000 - an anthology of an annual travel writing book. The pieces are wicked, and the narrators are divine, I truly traveled on motorbike through the jungles of Cambodia in the 80's listening to this.
Lovecraft - collected works. Great horror voices. I'd like the narrators of this to read me some Edgar Allen Poe, since the only other time he's been good was on the Simpsons
Consider the Lobster - read by Wallace. Awesome collection of essays. The kind of ridicule he has for the typical MURCAN almost seems directly a little at himself, being from buttfuck hick land and chewing tobacco and stuff. I got a sense he ate lobster at a restaurant like 3 weeks after writing the lobster essay, and that's the plight of the average American. Wanting change, but doing nothing real about it.
There's a sense of his humane fallibility in the tone of his voice, which I think is important to understanding his work that you don't get in the same multidimensional way with just the text

>>9538783
I actually found Eugene Onegin on an audiobook ( granted it's in Russian ) very positive feedbacks saying it's read incredibly well.

I'll give it a shot, got any other recommendation ?
I found lolita too but i'm not too familiar with it.

Listening to a book is more impressive than reading a book.

Anybody can read a book if they've got it right there in front of them.

>>9539715
Not sure if sarcasm.

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>shitting up your ears
>getting tinnitus and hearing loss because hours of headphone use
no thanks

>>9539747
>"tinnitus"
>google tinnitus
>holy shit this explains so much
i've been listening to music while falling asleep for the past 4 years, i get a very very very quite ringing occasionally once in a blue moon

>>9539762
I got mine after at most a year of falling asleep to music. I was blasting it though. Yesterday at 2am I got really angry cause the noises were distracting me and I couldn't sleep.
Just... protect your ears from now on please.

>>9539788
I can't fall asleep without music that's the problem, i got to listen to something, very low volume thought, but the ringing only occurs when i'm in class somewhy, and it's so rare i don't care about it.

But scary nonetheless, shit can drive you insane and that's my biggest fear in the world, becoming insane without being aware of it.

>>9539801
Listen on speakers then, much easier on your ears.
Or just listen to 4'33" on repeat.

>Is consuming information this way better than that way?

>>9539819
>4'33"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTEFKFiXSx4

is this a meme ?

>>9539827
No, everything is music, friend.

>>9539894
bumping>>9539708

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I listen to audiobooks at work while I stock shelves. Last year,when I was marooned at home with a broken leg,I tried getting into physical books again having both time and a lack of activities to inspire me. I managed one and a half novels,neither of which was particularly long. The half a book was Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath by HP Lovecraft,and I found myself rereading pages because the prose was so dense for me it needed serious work to force it into my head. I can't recall the one I did finish,but its next to my bed and I am posting from my phone on my nightly commute atm,but I will share it in the morning if anyone cares to know...

Anyway,to compare text to audio,I present the case of Le Mortr de Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory. I bought the abridged version of this read by Derrik Jacobi twice in cassette form,replacing them as they got tangled warped or otherwise destroyed,until I joined Audible and made it my first purchase. Years later,I decided to order the unabridged book version,being curious as to what was missing from the story. What I got was shocking: walls of words not even set in regular prose form with paragraphs or spaces between sentences. I went crosseyed immediately and donated it to my co ops library some time later. It DID make me appreciate the skill D Jacobi conveyed in his reading,not only navigating treacherous verbage,but giving it delicate nuances and real life.

I am sure there are other examples,and I am surer others will point them out.

>>9531815
Intellectually, yes. In terms of engagement, no.

There's a performance aspect to any out-loud reading, which means you have a mediator between you and the text. This is only as good or bad as the reader is. Great audiobooks (great readings of any kind, really) bring the listener closer to the text via careful emphasis, pacing, etc. Bad ones distance the listener from the text because of incomprehensibility and/or monotony. Most lie somewhere in the middle.

If you want the optimal experience, read first, so you have an established intimacy with the text, then listen to an audiobook to catch more of the emotive beats. Or do both simultaneously to stay focused.

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Harder to get the same depth of understanding as you don't end up reading annotations or rereading something you didn't fully understand as much.

Audiobooks were the original books though.

>>9541894
so deep!

>>9533911
Because in kindle you can't annotate

>>9538447
100p read those suckers, so many little details to take in so you can understand all the themes being developed

>>9531853
>steve reich
fucking loled

gut thread

>>9543707
agreed

>>9531853
no, you're just lonely

>>9535966
great taste

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>>9544079

too real

>tfw relying on audio friendship simulators now