Audible v. LibriVox: One of the many battles for audiobooks

During class on Wednesday, when professor Galey was discussing his research on The Sentimentalists, I immediately thought: “what about the audiobook version?” So my response to this week's blogging question is that I would like to study audiobooks in general and audiobook versions of David Copperfield in particular. I would choose David Copperfield because there are so many versions of it available, there was a time when Charles Dickens would read it to a crowd, and there is currently a version of it on my iPhone. To explain, this audiobook having many versions is important because the way in which these versions are accessed, performed, and edited is usually extremely different and affect listeners in different ways. For example, I splurged on an Audible version of David Copperfield, which was read by Simon Vance because it was easy to access on my phone, the performance was highly praised on the website, and I wanted to live the Victorian dream, haha. For an explanation within an explanation, I wrote that part about the Victorian dream because of a recently read paper, which had the thesis that audiobooks are the perfect medium for listening to Victorian novels, especially Charles Dickens, because many Victorian novelists wrote with the hope that their novels would be performed orally, and the modern audiobook achieves and surpasses this hope due to its portability and clarity (Rubery, 2008).

To move away from the rambling nature of this post thus far, I'll provide a brief example to illustrate why I think these artifacts would be interesting to study and compare. The version of David Copperfield that I have on my phone says a lot about me (I can afford to purchase something that I could listen to for free on LibriVox) and the creators (cheesy introduction music is important, so it can replace prefaces). Conversely, the LibriVox version shows that listeners value open access or free access and the creators believe that prefaces are more important than cheesy introduction music

References

Osseous. (2008, November 22). SDC14258[Photograph]. Retrieved from http://www.flickr.com/photos/osseous/

Rubery, M. (2008). Play it again, sam weller: New digital audiobooks and old ways of reading. Journal of Victorian Culture, 13(1), 58-79. doi: 10.3366/E1355550208000088