Audiobooks: Do better.
Tuesday, January 30, 2024
I’m audio-reading Tori Amos’s “Resistance”. It’s incredible, and quite an informative lesson in politics. I’m surprised by how much I’ve learned. Throughout it, she recites songs as spoken word pieces, and let me tell you that woman can emote. She should seriously do like a mini-tour of only spoken word pieces and solo piano pieces. The Deconstruction Tour. I can see it now…
But using Apple Books to audio-read has been a lackluster, underwhelming, if not downright frustrating experience. The track numbers don’t match the chapter numbers, which is my biggest pet peeve. And track numbers are essentially the only metadata included. I guess I’m lucky they included an image of the book’s original cover. And (and I know how this is gonna sound, but hear me out) there’s no transcription of any kind anywhere which means I can’t go back to a part that I want to re-audio-read. Yes, I get that a transcribed audiobook is a book. But I’m still frustrated and feeling totally left in the dark because there’s no way I can fast-forward or rewind to what I want to hear again, because there’s no way I’d be able to tell where it’s at.
Audiobooks should come with an eBook version. Even if it’s like a stripped down, plain text file. Give me something I can work with.
Hell, books should come with an eBook version.
Record labels are doing that - buy a vinyl album, get a digital download of it. And if record labels can do it, surely publishers can.