Confession: I used to hate eBooks, and I only recently got into audiobooks.
When I was younger, and eBooks were first becoming big, I was afraid of physical books going away. I’d miss a lot of things about physical books- seeing them on my shelves, the smell of a new one, the fact that they don’t have a battery to run out. I could go on forever about what I’d miss about physical books (Bookshops! Libraries!) but, after the initial hysteria died down, I began to let eBooks into my life. It started with classics. Instead of paying full price for a copy from a bookshop for my University course, thousands of classics were available for free right there on the app. Plus, I could search the text for particular words and phrases! Revalatory.
It took me a little while to branch out after that into regular use, and still only a portion of the reading I do is via eBook (just less than half), but their usefulness is so much greater than I first realised! They’re all right there on your phone when you need them, you can cart around huge books without the weight, you can read in the dark! In. The. Dark.
I only very recently got into audiobooks- and by very recently I mean the last couple of months. A few friends of mine swear by Audible, and I downloaded it ages ago, and never picked my trial book. There was too much pressure, okay? When everyone started to rave about Michael Sheen’s narration of La Belle Sauvage I put it on hold at my library and had to wait nearly 2 months for it, but wow is it worth it. That hyena laugh is going to HAUNT me. It didn’t solve my Audible choice problem though, but a happy accident did. I picked up Neil Gaiman’s The View From the Cheap Seats from the library, and, two stories in, decided that it would be better as an audiobook. Most of the things in the book are speeches, and Neil Gaiman has my favourite reading voice in the world. I can’t imagine using audiobooks regularly, but I’ve enjoyed this brief experience with them so much more than I thought I would.
It doesn’t matter how we consume stories, just that we continue to do so. How do you get your story fix?
Lucinda x
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