Reviewing Audiobooks

As a former academic, I’m big on the idea of citing sources, examples, and everything else under the sun. While the requirements for writing reviews and more “popular” analysis for blogs and print publication, I think the same rules generally apply. With the magic of hyperlinks, embedded media, and other nifty web-tricks, blogging makes the citing of sources a lot easier in some ways.

The problem, for me, is that I consume most of my fiction in the form of audiobooks. This is necessitated by a visual disability that makes reading print, while doable, painfully slow. Not only does this limit the range of material that I can cover, it also impedes my ability to cite passages easily. With print books, it’s easy to insert a bookmark, stick in a color-coded tab, or, if you don’t mind the scorn of book collectors, dog-ear a page to mark a particularly insightful or moving passage. No such mechanism is readily available for audiobooks, at least not in the form they’re popularly distributed. In order to cite a passage for later use, I’d have to write it down verbatim as I’m hearing it, or at the very least note down the time in the recording at which the passage appears. Since I’m often listening to books on a crowded bus or as I’m lying curled up in bed at night, these aren’t really practical solutions.

Until Apple, or other designers of MP3 players, invent some sort of audio-bookmarking system, I’ll just have to rely on my memory, such as it is, along with some selective Googling, to make sure I get my quotes and facts right.