Re: The Electrification of Books

>
>  There's a very important point buried indirectly in there, one that
>  someone made within the last couple days here as well (my apologies
>  to that earlier forgotten author). Perhaps, in a sense, paper books
>  are analogous to paper music, sold for the purposes of performing.

No matter what analogy you want to make, in either direction...though
Chris made a good point here... No matter what else, I want to address
a few things.

One is that people who are blind and MUST listen to the book read to
them (or authors who have a text to speech program helping them find
errors) are still having a "reading experience." Why? Because in order
to get anything out of the experience, you must be actively listening
to the words and taking in what those words mean. You're still
processing text.

That is not so with music. You CAN listen to the words of a song, but
do you do so every time you listen to music? Most people don't. When
you're dancing, you're not listening to the lyrics of every song.
You're listening to the beat and matching that...hopefully. What about
instrumental music?  There are no lyrics to focus on. That's not a
reading experience.

Simply put, it is a completely different sort of processing. Yes,
auditory vs. visual is different, so audio books are different than
reading from the page or screen, but verbal is also different than
math. Studies show that study (even the rudimentary study of finding
the beat) of music increases math skill, because the processing is
very similar. Listening to an audio book is on the verbal spectrum,
akin to conversation in the auditory range. Listening to music is
largely in the math spectrum, in the auditory range.

Are audio books closer to books than music? My money is on the fact
that books are books, whether read or read to you. That's one of the
reasons they tell you to read to babies and small children, before
they can read to themselves. There may be blurring of the lines, but
books are books, in the base sense of how you process the words you
see or hear.

Brenna
-- 
http://www.brennalyons.com http://www.myspace.com/brennalyons
All dreams have a meaning, even those that cannot possibly be true.
Mollie hopes so, anyway.  Is she losing her mind or learning her
destiny? FAIRY DREAMS -Mundania Press, LLC.


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