Katherine A. Powers reviews audiobooks every month for The Washington Post. She has written an interesting article discussing why some books are not suited to the audiobook format.
It’s easy to imagine, why books from some categories, naming only atlases and cookbooks, are hard to translate into audio format.
However, Powers picks up a few examples to explain why, for instance, some novels, should not be made into audiobooks.
Janice Hallett’s The Appeal has an intricate plot. Facts become dubious and characters develop in unexpected ways. The story unfolds entirely in emails, texts, and sticky notes.
💬 These visual enhancements go invisible in audio, making it difficult at times to figure out whose words are whose.
Another example: Laurence Sterne’s classic Tristram Shandy. The book includes all sorts of creative visual ideas: blank pages, scribbles, dots and typographical chaos. Can you imagine them “translated” into sounds?
Source: Audiobooks that should never be made – The Washington Post
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