13143: Are There Print Books That Should Not Be Made Into Audiobooks?

Hey there, hero!

It might have been a book I narrated.

Or it might not.

I’m not sayin’ one way or the other.

But a listener brought up a nonetheless interesting opinion: that there are some print books that should not be made into audiobooks.

Too complicated. Too controversial. Too many pictures. Too outdated. Too boring. Too…whatever.

Do you agree? What kind of content would stop you from accepting a job to narrate a particular book? Let me know in the comments below.

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Responses

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  1. Cook books are the worst! Unless you enjoy trying to pronounce, ingredients you’ve never heard of, French and Italian cooking terms and decoding abbreviations for measurements!
    NEVER AGAIN!!!

  2. There is always going to be material that someone, somewhere would not feel comfortable to produce or read. That’s just human nature. But nothing available that is being produced should be unavailable to visually impaired or otherwise impaired just because someone doesn’t like the content. We should all have access to any thoughts or ideas that can be presented. We should even go so far as to seek out these materials so that all will have access and opportunity to weigh in. No one has the right or superior intellect to censor what the rest of the world should have access to.

  3. I had a scammer make me a quick offer after my audition, and when they sent me the book, it was a very popular comic book. As you would expect, it had very little dialogue and the action was largely conveyed through the images. I would say comic books, for the most part, do not make good audiobooks.

  4. The blind and low vision community benefits from all kinds of audiobooks being made. However, I did not enjoy an audiobook I bought about home organization because I needed to see the pictures and ideas they were talking about.

    1. Kat, did you go back to your Audible library and see if there was a related PDF to download? If a related PDF was created for the title, any narrator with a properly prepared manuscript would have referenced that in the audiobook itself, but sometimes they don’t.

  5. I recently listened to an audiobook that was a biography of a well known person. The audiobook came with link that had all of the photos referenced in the book. This was a case where the photos really added to the story, and I don’t think it would have been as interesting without being able to see them. So maybe that is an option to consider when deciding whether to make an audiobook version of a book.

  6. How-to books that use diagrams and grids to illustrate a point but the author does not describe the information well enough to help the listener along.

  7. Sounds more like someone that did not care for the content. Also, he mentioned too complicated. That may be a red flag for the commenter that maybe his education level is not a match for the level of content. Honestly just sounds more like a typical internet troll and I wouldn’t put much weight on the comment. Especially if there were no other similar reviews.