How do ebooks and audiobooks affect appeal factor?

In a discussion on how ebooks and audiobooks affect appeal factor, it helps to refresh our collective memory on what appeal factors are. According to NoveList, appeal factors influence whether a book fits a reader’s style or mood. Appeal factors include such elements as Character, Story Line, Pace, Tone, and Writing Style (Novelist).

There is little doubt that converting a print book into an ebook or audiobook format affects appeal factors. Mediatore in her article Reading with your ears: Reader's advisory and Audio books states that for the recorded format an additional appeal factor is “audible presentation” (2003, pg. 319). This factor takes into account how the narrator combines all the other appeal factors in their narration. For many patrons the narrator can make or break the book.

For the Character appeal factor; what tone of voice does the narrator use for different characters? For Pacing; how quickly does the author read and modulate their voice overall? This can cause a mediocre title with a good narrator to circulate better than a great title poorly narrated. The inclusion of sound effects or music is another factor that can affect appeal in audio books. As anybody who loves music knows, it certainly can affect mood and perception. Think of a movie and how powerfully music is used to set the tone of a scene. Taking out the visual element, as in audiobooks, only increases music’s power.

I am a much heavier consumer of ebooks than audiobooks and my experience has been that the ebooks format has a subtler effect on appeal than audiobooks. With ebooks, at least when they first became widely available, what type of file (thus device) the title was downloaded on affected the types of options available to the reader. So appeal  varied a bit from device to device. This is very different from audiobooks where it really doesn’t matter if you use CD’s, Playaway, or download, the end product is always the same (Dunneback, 2011, pg. 327).

Today ebook options seem to be more universally similar between all devices. Being able to change the size of font to me seems the most obvious way ebooks can affect appeal factors. Less words on a page can give the reader the feel that the book is fast or faster paced than one would experience when reading the physical book. Ebooks are also not as easy to jump around in but they do include cool options such as looking up highlighted words in a dictionary. Some ebooks I’ve read also will also take the reader to a bio page about a character when their name is selected in the text. Additionally, in my opinion, when it comes to ebooks, touch screens are a must.

Dunneback, K., & Trott, B. (2011). E-books and Readers' Advisory. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 50(4), 325-9.

Mediatore, K. (2003). Reading with Your Ears: Readers' Advisory and Audio Books. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 42(4), 318-23.

NoveList. (2019). What is Appeal. Retrieved from https://www.ebscohost.com/novelist/our-products/novelist-appeals