Week 11 Prompt

Ebooks and audiobooks are a part of our landscape.  What does the change in medium mean for appeal factors?  If you can’t hold a book and feel the physical weight of it in your hands, how does that affect your knowledge of the genre?  How about readers being able to change the font, line spacing, and color of text- how does that affect pacing and tone?  How about audiobooks?  Track length, narrator choice, is there music?  I want you to think about how ebooks and audiobooks affect appeal factors- also think about appeals that are unique to both mediums.

I love technology so I have used a Kindle (and the upgrade Kindle Fire), read a book on my IPad and even listened to an audiobook but my preference will always be the physical hard copy book.

The story doesn’t change when using these devices.  In fact, these mediums just add to the story appeal factors by creating new appeal ones for the reader.  The ebook is making reading accessible and affordable as well.  I consider these two appeal factors because if they weren’t so convenient and in expensive (prices are continuing to go down and you are able to borrow an ebook from the library) a lot of people would not be using them (myself included).  Another appeal factor is being able to use a variety of different formats to read.  For instance, I can use my Kindle Fire at home and once the battery is dead, I will switch to my IPad and then use my wireless capabilities while I am out doing errands and have a break in between, I will use my Apple IPhone.  These different mediums enable me to change the font, line spacing and/or the color of the text depending on the device.  I consider these reading preferences appeal factors that just add to the story appeals.   On the other hand, two of the appeals - tone and pacing change in the Ebook format.   The tone can be affected by utilizing the font size, line spacing and even color of the text because it distorts what the author is trying to convey to the reader.  The appeal factor of pacing is lost because you don’t have the physical book to see the pages.

My dislike in using these devices to read a book on was never fully articulated until I had to answer this prompt. Well, I don’t have to use the reader preference options so the tone can remain intact but I don’t know how to remedy the pacing issue.  If a visual representation of the book was presented with the capability of actually turning the page maybe that would work.  Of course, it would need to allow the reader to look ahead and turn the pages.  I foreshadow that this function will be a reality soon.

During the times I have used an audio book (yes, I have tried more than once because I love technology as previously stated and I greatly need this medium at times in my life), the narrator’s voice has distracted me to the point where I didn’t care about the tone, the pacing, or any other of the appeal factors.  I have come to the conclusion that the narrator really makes the story either successful or not successful because the listener is totally dependent on him/her for all of the appeal factors (no, physical book).  I tried the audiobook again by searching for a narrator’s voice I recognized and it was successful because I also checked out the book and followed along which kind of defeats the purpose of using this medium.  The voice/narrator was Campbell Scot and the audio book was “Oryx and Crake” by Margaret Atwood.