by Eva Quintana
The iPhone has completely changed the idea of audiobooks. While a few years back we used to think of audiobooks as recordings in huge tapes that were ideal to listen in the car during long commutes, we now know that there are audiobooks so sophisticated that the reader needs to focus only on them to take advantage of all of its features.
Even though there are many companies producing audiobooks for mobile phones, and especially for the iPhone, there are two that stand out because of the richness of their production work and the success they have had in their field: Enhanced Editions and Vook. To analyze some of the features each company offer in their audiobooks, we will focus on a few of their titles.
Enhanced Editions produces unique audiobooks that are not only about listening to someone’s reading of a text. They have built in the possibility of a special soundtrack, they offer multimedia extras and, most importantly, their audiobooks synchronize the reading with the texts. No other ereader company had done that before. You can follow the audio’s reading, turn off the audio or switch from audio to text instantly. Moreover, the iPhone picks up your book where you left it the last time, so you don’t loose your place.
Enhanced Editions, a British company made up of editors, publishers, designers and technologists, tries to generate an enhanced reading experience. Their website states that they don’t want to launch audiobooks full of features just for the sake of technological experimentation.
The company has ten audiobooks until now (already selling or about to get launched), among them The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, by Philip Pullman, two books by Barack Obama and Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro. They all have beautiful typography that can be changed by the readers, who can choose between Helvetica and Georgia, just as they can change the font size and style of the text; the books have a night mode where the text and the background switch colors, spreading less light around and using less battery power, and it’s possible to add bookmarks and to send quotes to friends by email (because of copyright issues, this feature is limited to one paragraph).
Nick Cave’s audiobook is specially interesting because Cave not only wrote the book and read it aloud, but also worked on the soundtrack (with Warren Ellis). This edition, developed in association with Canongate Books in the UK (first publisher of the novel in 2009), Faber and Faber in the US, HarperCollins in Canada and Text Publishing in Australia, also includes eleven videos of Cave reading from the novel.
Cave, lead singer of a number of bands, has worked on the soundtrack of films like The Road and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. As an author, he wrote And the Ass Saw the Angel in 1989, and the screenplay for the film The Proposition. In this audiobook the Australian artist merges both interests, music and literature.
“Put Cormac McCarthy, Franz Kafka and Benny Hill together in a Brighton seaside guesthouse and they might just come up with Bunny Munro. A compulsive read possessing all Nick Cave’s trademark horror and humanity”, said Irvine Welsh about the novel. The audiobook, on the other hand, was described in WIRED as “Pure punk poetry”.
The project to transform the book into an audiobook–now described as the most ambitious to date–was born a lot before there was a printed edition: Nick Cave recorded the videos while still editing the manuscript. Produced by artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, the videos show Nick Cave seated in front of the camera and reading aloud. Behind him there’s a projection of some images loosely related to the story, and the musical score by Cave and Ellis’ set an interesting, new atmosphere.
The enhanced edition of Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro is a unique multidisciplinary artwork. The reading experience of this audiobook is a lot richer than if only reading. With the enhanced edition, the novel gains a different texture, a renewal of some sort. Having said so, it’s important to mention that even if Cave’s reading is exceptional, the soundtrack is irregular; the music does accentuate some of the passages, but in many cases it seems misplaced, and there are some frivolous sound effects that add nothing to the book (a doorbell when the narrator says that Bunny Munro just rang the doorbell, an engine when someone leaves in a car). The videos are a good extra feature, but the truth is you can just go without them.
While Enhanced Editions take a dive in deep waters, aiming to make an artistic statement with a few of their titles, Vook has a more commercial strain, offering self-help books and best-sellers like Unleashing the Superideavirus, by Seth Godin. A second venue for Vook is public domain titles, and so the company has made audiobooks of some of the classics, like Sherlock Holmes, Alice in Wonderland and Treasure Island.
Vooks are available in two formats: as a mobile application and a web-based application to read on the computer. The text is intertwined with videos that enhance the story, and the reader can connect with authors and friends through social media, all on one screen and without having to switch between platforms.
In the case of Seth Godin’s audiobook, there are 18 videos for 18 chapters and many links to the Internet. This self-help marketing and business book is, according to Vook’s website, the most downloaded ebook in history. Now, Vook offers a new edition with recent information on the subject and original video material.
Vook’s books (such an imaginative name!) are significantly cheaper than the ones offered by Enhanced Editions. The public domain audiobooks are priced between $0.99 (Stevenson’s Treasure Island, full with illustrations) and $2.99 (The Sherlock Holmes Experience, which includes two novellas by Arthur Conan Doyle and a number of videos that delve into the history and legend surrounding the character of Holmes). Seth Godin’s book is $4.99, and Crush It, by Gary Vaynerchuk, is $6.99. The most expensive one is Louder Than Words, by John Navarro, priced at $16.99, a book on “how to master ‘non-verbal intelligence’”. What makes Navarro’s book different to the others is the number of videos included, 22 for Louder Than Words.
Vook’s productions lean towards the conjunction between text and related video that add something to the ideas depicted on writing. Enhanced Editions, on the other hand, work on a new formula that doesn’t really go beyond the text, but enriches it; instead of adding new content to the existing text, Enhanced Editions strengthens it with an excellent reading performance, a very attractive reading environment and recordings on video of that same performance. The correlation between reading and text, which is the feature that makes the company most proud of, is simply remarkable, even though it doesn’t work perfectly every time (when a paragraph is too long and takes more than a screen, the voice keeps going unaccompanied by the written text until the voice of the reader finishes that paragraph and starts another one). This feature is most appreciated by reluctant readers, people learning English and really for anyone that enjoy a good reading performance.
This in not a new media at all. In the 30’s there was a big push of audiobooks for the blind, and even before that radio fans went crazy with literary series or short stories read aloud every week. In 1938 Orson Welles made history when his radio performance of The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells, led the listeners that had missed the introduction to believe that a martian invasion was taking place.
Enhanced Editions, more than any other company, is taking that illusion to a new dimension, where voice and written text combine to absorb the readers undivided attention and make up the richest imaginable reading experience.
Resources
http://www.enhanced-editions.com/
