I am familiar with the Gutenberg Project but I wasn't aware that it holds the audio
books. What an excellent choice of classics it provides. It feels good seeing so many old familiar titles:
books. What an excellent choice of classics it provides. It feels good seeing so many old familiar titles:
Mark Twain is listed there as the most popular Author and his "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" as one of most downloaded titles.
Would audiobooks replace the printed books? Here is a very interesting article on the subject:
http://ezinearticles.com/?Audio-Books---The-Big-Wave-of-the-Future&id=499788The author of the article, Wayne Leskosky, who is also an owner of the audio book store, argues that audio books have many advantages over printed books. First, we are leading very busy lifestyles and there is no time to read. We can combine listening to the audio book with other tasks: commuting, shopping, computing, travelling, doing house chores. The audio books are portable, downloading is fast and we can keep them forever. There is a great selection of them online and their quality has improved greatly: today's audio books are made into plays, with different narrators, sound effects and background music. They much more affordable. They don't need space, we can store them online.
Well, I don't like the notion of print becoming extinct. I love my iPod but I use it for listening to music. I don't like books read to me. Particularly if this is a novel, a poetry. The stranger's voice takes away a mystery, imposes different meaning, interpretation. I like to feel my book, to live through its story, to imagine.
With all due respect to technological progress, I like to think that print will survive. That reading will survive.
2 comments:
More democracy means more freedom. Or does it? American democracy is, in many peoples minds, the model for the rest of the world. Fareed Zakaria points out that the American form of democracy is one of the least democratic in use today.
Fareed Zakaria is the editor of Newsweek International, a regular columnist for that magazine's domestic edition, and a political analyst for ABC News. He received a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from Harvard. He lives in New York City.
Ned Schmidtke has played leading roles on Broadway, on national tours, and at dozens of regional theaters in the United States and Canada. He currently resides in Los Angeles where he continues to work in theater as well as film and television.
There is good news for audio book lovers. Being an audio book fan I come across a literary sensation book Possession which won the Booker prize. This is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance. Get your copy at ”Audio Books”
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