I Listened to My First Audiobook and Here’s What Happened
How I got over my ‘fear’ of audiobooks and why it paid off
I’ll start this by saying that I am fully aware I’m very late to the game, but here we are. Audiobooks have been around for some time now, with publishers investing more and more time, money and effort into it. In 2019, audiobook sales increased by 43% and generated £69 million for the industry.
At the end of 2019, Deloitte predicted that the audiobook market would grow by 25% in 2020 to amass a total of £2.6 billion. As 2020 has just drawn to a close, that number isn’t yet confirmed,, but reports suggest that audiobooks will very soon outsell ebook sales.
Becoming increasingly aware of their dominance in the market, I felt somehow ashamed to admit I never tried listening to one. So one rainy lockdown afternoon I finally took the leap and downloaded audible after seeing yet another one of their YouTube ads — kudos to their marketing team, it worked.
As I was browsing the numerous and titles on Audible, I settled for The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. I caught myself wondering why on earth it’s taken me this long to venture into the audiobook universe. After a few hours of questioning if I’m even worthy enough of calling myself an ‘avid reader’ I think I figured it out.
Why Audiobooks Seemed Scary
English is not my first language; I learned it in school from Year 2 onwards as a second language, and ever since then, 99.9% of the books I buy are in English. But even after fifteen years of being fluent, I still need subtitles when watching a film, and I pray that one day some Black Mirror AI technology will descend upon us to allow for closed captions when I’m in a group of people talking over each other.
So perhaps I stayed away from audiobooks all this time because I was sceptical about having to rely solely on audio to understand a story. I was scared that I wouldn’t completely understand every word that was being read to me, or that I would have to pay so much attention to the speech that I wouldn’t relax and actually enjoy the story. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Within the first five minutes of The Midnight Library, I was completely engulfed in the world of the story and not the least bit concerned about having to pay attention to the speech. The book is narrated by Carey Mulligan who does a wonderful job at enunciating the words clearly and constructing the sentences fluidly. She also slightly chances her intonation to differentiate between the character which, much to my surprise, is a bonus.
I won’t go into the story itself for the purposes of not making this a book review, but I’ll just quickly say that I’m glad I chose a story by Matt Haig as my first audiobook. The subtle poetic elements of his writing translate incredibly well into audio and make the experience even richer.
Time and Spare Time
I have realised that many trade fiction and nonfiction audiobooks span around eight to twelve hours long, with The Midnight Library sitting at 8 hours and 49 min. When I first saw this number, I confess I was a bit taken aback by the thought of dedicating nine full hours of my time to one thing. But after realising that a Netflix short series is usually longer than that and shamefully admitting that my daily screen time on TikTok is much higher than it should be, nine hours didn’t seem like such a hurdle after all.
In fact, after the first two hours or so that flew by, it was actually quite nice knowing that I was spending that much amount of time doing something productive. When I read physical books, I don’t have the habit of timing myself, so it sometimes feels like I’m not putting aside enough time to read. So the fact that an audiobook is quantifiable down to the minute soon became a comforting feeling because I knew I was putting my spare time to good use.
I soon started incorporating listening to the audiobook into small mindless tasks like washing the dishes or cleaning the flat, which surprised me because I’m someone who thoroughly enjoys silence. I work in silence, I ride the tube in silence, and I shower in silence; it’s comforting, and I’ve grown to love it. The fact that I was so quick to embrace listening to an audiobook during the times of my day that are usually accompanied by silence was a pleasant surprise, and I have to admit a nice change.
From there, it wasn’t long until I caught myself listening to The Midnight Library as a substitute for watching primetime television, but I won’t admit to that just yet.
An Ode to Audible
One last thing; I cannot end this article without praising Audible for having such a user friendly and interface. I’m someone who underlines quotes and phrases. My favourite books are covered in notes around the edges in almost every page, so I admit that going into an audiobook thinking I wasn’t going to be able to do that was quite a daunting thought. But Audible had me covered.
They have a feature that allows you to save specific passages in the book while reading and adding comments to each saved selection. I told myself that once lockdown is over and it’s safe to go to pubs again, I shall buy whoever came up with that feature a pint because they made Audible completely exceed my expectations. Thank you.
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