Aman Mittal's Blog, page 13

I am writing an Ebook for Bloggers

A tentative title and a tentative ebook cover
The year 2018: Will write an Ebook

This year, one of my goals is to write and publish an ebook.

GUEST POST: My experience with AudioBooks by Crafty Reader

Audiobooks isn’t a very new trend. It is a rather a new commercial trend. I first came across the very idea of audiobook when I was watching the movie The Reader(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0976051/). In the movie, Hanna couldn’t read or write but loves listening to stories. So, throughout her life, her lover records readings of books and mails them to her. Of course, by the time movie was released, audiobooks were already in the market but not as popular as they were are now. Yet, it was still a curiosity and alien idea to me, until a few days back, when I planned on reading 120 books in 365 days.

So, to fulfill my reading goal, I started finding of free sources for audiobooks and I came across quite a few:

1. Librivox (https://librivox.org/)
It a free platform where you cannot only hear audiobooks but also volunteer to read one. It is available both on a website and as an app. You won’t find the latest releases there but a lot of classics are available, that too in different versions. They can be downloaded too. I find it limited in its options but it is always worth a try.

2. Archives(https://archive.org/)
It has a huge collection of audiobooks, ebooks, podcasts etc. Their collection also includes LibriVox recordings. There are several formats available for every single recording. I tried searching The Master of the Game by Sidney Sheldon, Lord of the Rings; yes, it was there. The website shows an option of downloading audiobooks, however, I have never been able to download any, except the one with torrent links.

The options on these websites are limited but then, they are free.

So, I download ” And Then There Were None ” by Agatha Christie from archives.org. It was six hours audio for 264 pages long book. I think that is too much time for that size of a book, the reading pace of the author wasn’t very slow but I won’t call it up to the mark. One of the most annoying things is that that from the beginning of the front page of the book till the last one, everything was read. Also, I had to really concentrate on what reader was saying. Even though I was able to manage to do other works side by side but I have to concentrate hard on to the audiobook. Also, if I lost track of it, I didn’t know at which setting of the time do I need to change to, I was blindly looking for the right time set. And after six hours of listening, it seemed like quite a task, I was exhausted, but I think that was probably because I listened to it at one stretch.

I think of story-telling as an art. You need real skills to perform it. The orator in this audiobook was able to mock the voices of the characters and bring some action into the reading but it wasn’t as much fun to call it a storytelling session. Maybe this shouldn’t be my expectation from audiobook but this is what I expected.

The only factors which can persuade me to listen to audiobooks in future are, firstly, I can listen to audiobooks while travelling or where the place is too crowded to hold a book in hand, in other words, I can listen to it while doing other words and Secondly, they help in finishing off those books which I really don’t want to buy a hard copy or read an ebook either.

PS: I am not against audiobooks but it is just not my things.

Happy Reading

Shoutout to my Blogging Friend: JenGee

Connecting with bloggers is always my priority and I am so glad that I could connect with JenGee last week. She even took time to visit my blog and mention me in one of her posts.

A BIG THANK YOU Jen