Audio Books

Yes I use BorrowBox from the library and always use preview to see if I like the narrators voice. I have an immediate yes or no response.

I get Alexa to read my kindle books at night. I ask her to switch off after 30 minutes which just times it nicely to fall asleep. Books cost me 99p each so an inexpensive way to hear audio books. I have joined Audible a couple of times but I seldom find anything I want . One exception was Miriam Margolis who reads her own book and it is great as she is so good at accents.

My late husband was disabled and struggled to hold a book he used to use www.listening-books.org.uk/ sorry if not allowed to put a link but it is a charity he used to pay a very reasonable yearly subscription.

I've become an avid BorrowBox user, partly because I can't focus my eyes on a book by evening, and partly because it helps me get to sleep.

I know a narrator is good when I suddenly realize, part way through a book, that I haven't actually given the narration a thought!
(It's unfortunate that I (we?) notice what's not good so much more quickly than what is good.)

The very last book I listened to included several working-class characters from Sheffield.
Unfortunately, the narrator had no idea how to pronounce the glottal 't' that was ever-present in the dialogue.
Each time it was needed, she was adding what sounded like a whole extra word: to. This resulted in sentences such as, "She'll start work in to factory^ ", and "He's gone down to to pub to talk to to landlord".

As a native northerner, I found this very distracting, as I reflected each time on what she should have said.

The book I'm listening to at the moment has a narrator whose French characters mispronounce common French words such as Monsieur. OK, I only notice those because I can speak the language, so I'm probably being a bit unreasonable, and she is otherwise a decent narrator.

There are some great narrators out there though - I just wish that the technology was there to enable us to select whichever one we wanted for every book that we download.

I’m probably one of Audible’s best customers.
I think that I have well over 250 books.

Just checked - 294 titles.
And that doesn’t include the ones that I have returned

Another Audible fan here. Audible has a lot of ‘included with membership’ stuff too now, which has allowed me to listen to authors I haven’t heard before. You don’t have to download them to your library. I have 248 books in there.

Hello Blossoming ?
Yes, it’s surprising how much excellent free stuff there is on there

Currently listening to John Guy’s biography of Mary, Queen of Scots. The reader is a woman with an ‘RP’ accent and I am giggling at the way she butchers Scots place names. She has a pleasant voice otherwise.