Christopher SharBy ANDREW ADAM NEWMANJANICE RASPEN, a librarian at an elementary school in Fredericksburg, Va., came clean with her book club a couple years ago. They were discussing “A Fine Balance,” a novel set in India in the 1970s by Rohinton Mistry and an Oprah’s Book Club pick, when she told the group — all fellow teachers — that rather than read the book, she had listened to an audio version.
“My statement was met with stunned silence,” said Ms. Raspen, 38.
Finally Catherine Altman, an art teacher, spoke up.
“I said that I felt like listening to a book was a copout,” Ms. Altman said. “I’m not like a hardcore book group person — a lot of times I don’t even finish the book. But my point was that she is a librarian and I thought it was pretty ridiculous. I’m a painter and it would be like me painting by numbers.”
The perennial disagreement in book groups has been over authors, with the single-malt drinkers arguing for F. Scott Fitzgerald and the chardonnay drinkers for Anita Shreve. But the latest schism in the living room lit-fests is not over whom they read, but if they read.
Is it acceptable, they debate within and among themselves, to listen to that month’s book rather than read it? Or is that cheating, like watching the movie instead of reading the book?
Because audio enthusiasts generally listen aloud in a private space like their cars or with headphones, they are spared having to publicly defend the format. When they join reading groups, however, they enter what can be enemy territory, where dyed-in-the-wool bibliophiles want to hear nothing of a book but the crack of its spine.
Dain Frisby-Dart, 40, an avid audio book listener from Trempealeau, Wis., told her book group a few years ago that she was listening to the current selection. One of the members, a man in his 70s, reacted as if she had been reading CliffsNotes.
“He said, ‘It doesn’t count if you listened to it. That’s cheating,’ ” Ms. Frisby-Dart said. “I was so floored by the comment that I just kind of laughed it off.”
But Ms. Frisby-Dart was not laughing when she thought about it later, and she decided against audio for the group’s next selection, and the one after that.
Now she listens to only about 10 percent of her book group’s titles. “Perhaps I should stick up for audio books a little bit more,” she said, “but I do feel like there’s a bit of a stigma listening to them.”
Plenty of book club members listen unabashedly. But others cringe at the thought of facing the hairy eyeball from those with whom they share sofas. After all, the settings ideally should be relaxed, courteous and erudite, even when the selection is a James Patterson thriller. Some don’t even admit that they listen.
But listen they do, though the stigma persists that listening to books is Reading Lite. People are pressed for time, and so growth in the audio book industry has been brisk, with overall sales (downloads, CDs and cassettes) at $871 million in 2006, up 5 percent over the previous year.
Tara Volpe, 28, a pharmaceutical sales representative, is an enthusiast. Because she spends a lot of time in her car, she listens while driving to far-flung appointments — even when the books are the assignment for the book group she runs in Sayville, N.Y., made up of women in their 20s and 30s. (One recent pick: “He’s Just Not That Into You.”)
Yet her listening pleasure is tinged with guilt.
“I know it only matters that I got the content of the book and its ideas,” she said. “But I still feel like I’m trying to cover up an affair.”
Donald Katz had worked as a journalist and author for 20 years when, in 1995, he started Audible.com, which features audio books for download through its Web site and through iTunes.
“When I started Audible, I was generally greeted with a level of derision,” Mr. Katz said by phone from Audible’s headquarters in Newark. “Not only did I get flak from my publishing industry friends, but my wife’s book group in Montclair let it be known that they considered listening to books to be cheating.” Today, though, several members of his wife’s group listen, too.
Book groups are by all estimates on the rise, thanks in no small part to Oprah Winfrey, whose 11-year-old Oprah’s Book Club not only spurs sales of her selections but inspires viewers to form gaggles to discuss them. About 20 million Americans are members of book groups, double the number just eight years ago, said Diana Loevy, the author of “The Book Club Companion.”
As for audio books’ place in reading groups, Ms. Loevy said the percentage of people who listen instead of read is low but climbing. For them, her book suggests titles and frequently notes exemplary audio versions, like Joe Morton narrating “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison or Toni Morrison reading her own “Beloved.”
John Alexander, the vice president of consumer sales and marketing at Recorded Books, an audio book publisher with a rent-by-mail division, said many of his customers are book club members. “Individuals will call us to say they’re ordering a book,” he said, “and they say, ‘I need it by this date because it is due for book club.’ ”
Mr. Alexander said there are some cases where reading actually is verboten, when the entire group listens instead of reads, but those are rare.
Do you really get as much out of a book if you listen instead of read?
“If the goal is to appreciate the aesthetic of the writing and understand the story,” said Daniel T. Willingham, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Virginia, then there won’t be much difference between listening and reading. “The basic architecture of how we understand language is much more similar between reading and listening than it is different.”
Julie Stephens, an investigations assistant with the Canada Revenue Agency, finds that listening to books on headphones sharpens her focus at work. It not only muffles “a lot of noise and chatter and gossip that I’d rather not listen to,” she said, but keeps her up to speed for a book group she runs.
Ms. Stephens, of Ottawa, Ontario, works part time at a bookstore and talks up audio books to customers. Nevertheless, she does not always tell her book group that she listened to a title, which she does about 40 percent of the time.
“I try not to tell them all that much — I don’t want them to think that I’ve only listened to the book,” said Ms. Stephens, who often chooses audio to reacquaint herself with books she’s read.
Zella Ondrey, who lives in Hazleton, Pa., is open about her listening experiences. Ms. Ondrey, 44, who moderates a book group at a Barnes & Noble, listens while traveling for her job as a vice president at the Haworth Press, a publisher of academic and professional-development books (none of which are available in an audio format).
She recently listened to an abridgement — the only audio version available — of “Ahab’s Wife: Or, the Star-Gazer” and admitted as much to her group.
The book, like “Moby-Dick,” to which it alludes, is heavy on description. “Apparently some of the detail it went through — like 15 pages describing a lighthouse — was rather boring,” said Ms. Ondrey, adding that while others in the group were not riveted they seemed to consider themselves more virtuous for having waded through it the old-fashioned way.
“I was frowned upon because I didn’t go through the same machinations,” she said.
But that scorn was nothing compared to what she gets on a regular basis from her husband.
“My husband makes fun of me all the time,” Ms. Ondrey said. Nevertheless she recommends that he read titles she enjoyed hearing. “He’ll have a book in his hand that he’s reading and I’ll say, ‘How about if I tell you the ending, and we’ll see if it’s the same?’ ”
