Audiobooks have exploded in the last years, they are in my opinion the future of storytelling.
Nowadays every writer is required to have their book in three main forms: Paperback, ebook, and audiobook this because you have to accommodate the needs of everybody and because technology is going in a direction in which everything will be digitalized.
This is a great plan at the very least.
Today storytelling is done with a lot of means, there is literature, cinema, music photography and all of them are going digital.
But today I want to speak about audiobooks and the reason they are so amazing.
Movies are great, they have (at least today) amazing CGI, fantastic photography, and (unfortunately not very commonly) a good story, and passing a couple of hours watching one is lovely but you have to stay in front of the screen because the audio is only a small part of the experience.
Again a book is a lovely way to pass the time, but yet you have to stay behind the story, and you have to read it, and this is somehow time-consuming.
Here we arrive at the audiobook: You clean the house, you go for a run, for a walk, you are on the train, you are on the bed in the evening, and yet you are still able to assimilate hours over hours of stories simply playing the audiobook.
I’m not saying that reading is a waste of time, this goes beyond every fiber of my essence but I’m saying that assimilating a story while doing other stuff is an amazing act of time management and, because of this audiobooks are the best weapon that today’s storytelling has in its arsenal.
Plus a good audiobook is generally read by amazing voice actors and, in the very best-case scenario, your favorite actor, I absolutely love them.
The only thing that keeps audiobooks so far away today is the colossal price they have, it is actually expensive to produce one and for expensive I mean that Iain Banks – The algebraist can cost up to 30£ that for a digital product is way too much.
But the ebook providers know this so if you take Kobo that is the one that I use to buy my books and audiobooks gives you a 6£ monthly subscription fee in which you get one credit that you can exchange for a single audiobook and for 20£ you get 3 credits so 3 audiobooks.
Until now I never paid for an audiobook its full price, I always used the credits I earned and bought, and to now it was the best experience of my life.
Buy more audiobooks guys…
-ldmarchesi