Book club snobs consider audiobooks ‘cheating’
August 2nd, 2007A story in today’s New York Times examines the increasingly popular practice of listening to books — and how many book-club types consider that to be “cheating.”
Because audio enthusiasts generally listen aloud in a private space like their cars or with headphones, they are spared having to publicly defend the format. When they join reading groups, however, they enter what can be enemy territory, where dyed-in-the-wool bibliophiles want to hear nothing of a book but the crack of its spine.
Dain Frisby-Dart, 40, an avid audio book listener from Trempealeau, Wis., told her book group a few years ago that she was listening to the current selection. One of the members, a man in his 70s, reacted as if she had been reading CliffsNotes.
“He said, ‘It doesn’t count if you listened to it. That’s cheating,’ ” Ms. Frisby-Dart said. “I was so floored by the comment that I just kind of laughed it off.”
Christianity Today’s Ted Olsen takes exception to the snobbery and leaps to the defense of audiobooks. He makes a great point:
But really, if you’re going to mock someone in your group for being lowbrow because they listened to He’s Just Not That Into You rather than read a paper copy, you might want to check your irony detector.
Matthew Hall also addresses the topic.
I frequently listen to audiobooks on the bus, where I get awful headaches if I try to read. I view them as a nice convenience, allowing me to spend time “reading” that I wouldn’t be able to otherwise. Also, like Ted Olsen, I find that listening to a book keeps me from skimming ahead and missing important details.
I’m a little confused by Matthew Hall’s take that reading is in such great jeopardy - didn’t we just have the single largest first printing of any book in history?
Is it ‘cheating’ if one is blind?
Though I prefer to read a book and not listen to one, why should someone else’s preference of the inverse be viewed as ‘cheating’?
I could see an argument against abridged audiobooks because you are not getting all of the details, but listening to a book is clearly not “cheating”. You can’t cheat if there’s no competition.
Peter,
I’m picking up on recent studies from the NEA that conclude that less than half of Americans read literature (see here).
Also, it’s worth noting that a number of researchers have, within the past two weeks (a href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/books/11potter.html?ex=1186200000&en=1de90c6ca03957a0&ei=5070″>link), argued that the astronomical sales figures of the Potter series have not translated into a growing rate of general literacy and readership among young adults.
Sorry - here’s the link to the NYTimes story.
Matt - thanks for the links. Interesting stuff.
Tim,
How about the fact that the majority of Christians throughout Church History listened to God’s word read because they did not have their own copy of God’s word. Did they cheat?
It is a ‘book’ club, not a ‘CD’ club.