How many times do you listen to audiobooks? Well, if you are a new entrant into the world of reading, you will find yourself spending more hours with headphones covering your ears rather than glasses over your eyes and pages underneath or in front. However, in both cases, primarily, you are losing this or that prowess of your body – eyesight or hearing power. Well, is it even a thing when we compare it to the pleasure that we can extract by reading a piece of wonderful fiction or even a gloomy poetry collection? Certainly not! And therefore, readers will engage with books – they will either read or listen to them – and this will continue. The question is, however, should we read or listen to books?
I listened to the audiobook Janbaaz by Gautam Rajrishi on the Storytel app and it was amazing. Why? It may be because of the way it was narrated and also because it was more in motion rather than being static as usually the novels or short stories are by traditional authors. Gautam Rajrishi is a Hindi author, Urdu Shayar, poet and contemporary literary personality who writes for the young generation, emotional, appealing, action-packed and youthful. They can listen to his content and also enjoy reading it. I did both and I truly liked what I read or listened to.
On the other hand, if we talk about classical works, with authors no more to consult on the tone, pitch, narrative style etc, I do not think that an audiobook might be as pleasing as the book itself. Though it is just my opinion and it might be wrong, without a doubt, I still believe the same because I have experienced it many times. Especially in the case of Indian books, you will need to read the books by traditional or classical authors rather than listen to them.
Surprisingly, there are many apps in the market that offer you this audiobook experience. Amazon has Audible, StoryTel has its app and there are apps that specifically offer non-fiction books. By the trends, one can easily sense that the Audiobook industry is going to book in the coming years, rather sooner. And, extrapolating the concept, one can also say that modern readers will find themselves accustomed to listening to the books they like rather than reading them. Who knows?
Well, the case can be argued from both sides and we can come across many perspectives. However, we cannot skip such collages of thoughts as we are bound to think and discuss. What do you think? What do you like? How do you prefer a book today? How will you prefer a book tomorrow?
By Madhur Sharma for Featured Books
