Week 11 Prompt

            The Characteristics and Appeal Factors discussed by Neal Wyatt and Joyce Saricks (2019) in The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction include pacing, story line, tone, characterization, frame/setting, and language/style (pp. 5-9). In her article “Reading with Your Ears: Readers' Advisory and Audio Book” Kaite Mediatore (2003) mentions that, “[i]n audio books, how a narrator approaches the pacing of the story can determine how interested the reader-listener becomes in the book” (p. 319) and that “[w]hen evaluating an audio book, considering how the pace of the book and the pace of the narrator work together is imperative” (p. 319). I completely agree with Mediatore that pacing is a critical element for the appeal of audiobooks, because I almost always find the pace of the reading to be too slow for my personal taste. However, I don’t think this is a result of a mismatch between the narrator’s pace and the pace of the story; I think it’s more likely that I don’t like whatever is considered the “baseline” pacing for audiobooks. For a long time, that caused me to not be interested in listening to audiobooks. However, at one point I tried Overdrive and Audible in order to listen to books while driving and doing other tasks, and I discovered that those platforms both have a feature that allows the listener to change the narration speed. Generally, by setting the speed at about 1.5 I tend to enjoy the pacing more. This feature might be worth mentioning to patrons who may be hesitant to try an audiobook because of the pacing, because it provides the listener more control over the experience.

            I think as far as e-books and appeal factors go, I wouldn’t think the appeal factors would be changed that much going from a print version of a book to the e-book version. I haven’t read an e-book before, so I might be missing how appeal factors would be altered by the format since I’m not very familiar with it from a personal perspective, but I think that story line, tone, characterization, frame/setting, and language/style would all remain the same between the two formats. However, if a reader can change the font, line spacing, and color of text for an e-book (something I didn’t realize they could do until I read this prompt), I think that could alter the pacing by either speeding up or slowing down how quickly the reader can read the e-book compared to the print version. For example, a reader could change the font of the text to be a font they are more comfortable reading and that could accelerate the pace at which they read the text. If the reader wants to slow down the pace of their reading in order to match a slower pace of the story line, the reader could try changing the line spacing in such a way that slows them down.

 

Works Cited

Mediatore, K. (2003). Reading with Your Ears: Readers' Advisory and Audio Books. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 42(4), 318-323.

Wyatt, N., & Saricks, J. G. (2019). The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction (3rd ed.). Chicago: ALA Editions, An imprint of the American Library Association.