Art & Entertainment: Formats of Audio Books

Author: Steve Seddon

The most common query my website receives is: "What does unabridged audio book mean?" So I thought that it would be useful in this article to outline the different formats of audio books currently available.

Unabridged audio book. An unabridged audio book is one read / performed as the author wrote it - the whole book read from cover to cover.
Abridged audio book. An abridged audio book is one where sections have been cut out so that the focus is much more on the action. A "reader's digest if you like.

Which is best? Now that is a tricky one to answer. For me, it is unabridged every time, but in an audio book forum recently there was one of many discussions on this that made some valid points for both. My argument is that often in the UK audio books are so heavily abridged that the book is ruined. Typical examples are Colin Dexter audios & Peter Robinson audios. They will go from 12 hours unabridged to 3 hours abridged. When driving & listening, 5 seconds of lost concentration on the audio whilst changing lanes & the plot can be lost totally.

The other point for me is that great works of literature should not be destroyed to produce a commercially viable audio book. Wuthering Heights in 5 hours? Where are the moorland descriptions? Where is the complexity of character?

There is of course a counter argument. One was from a Sunday Times journalist that was slightly tongue in cheek and ran along the lines of - "if you had to listen to the junk I have to, you would praise abridgers for the pain they save me".

One customer of ours asked, "have ever listened to an unabridged Tom Clancy?".

The other argument put forward was that some readers of the abridged versions are so good that they would choose the abridged version every time. The example quoted was Tony Robinson reading Terry Pratchett. I'm not persuaded by that one, because if Tony Robinson read the unabridged version, the listener would prefer the unabridged version.