First Attempt At Audiobook

I've been on a Charles Dickens kick recently. I have searched for some time for an author who could write well both from the head and the heart. I'm not sure why I had not read Dickens when I was younger. A part of me is glad that I waited, for hs words are the words of life. It is good to save certain things for later.

I also recently acquired an iPod. Naturally wanting to find an agreeable intersection between these two media I searched for and found Dickens on the iTunes store. Yesterday I downloaded a full copy of "Sketches by Boz" and looked forward to putting on my headbuds as I lay down to rest at the end of a very long day.

Did I mention the Boz was recorded by Babblebooks?

What a complete shock to begin to listen to the first story and to hear what sounded like a person with an electro-larynx and no personality atonally reading words that it did not understand into a recorder. I say it because although the vioce sounds vaguely human, it is clearly a reading machine.

Reading is a skill that only humans possess. It is one of the skills, like reading a map, that humans do well and machines do not do well. Machines lack the intuition - the fuzzy logic - to make sense of the world as we do.

A machine should not be allowed to read Charles Dickens. Babblebooks has made a mistake. I imagine it is the product of some techno geek - perhaps an MIT student's senior project - who thinks that making machine read classics available to the masses is doing a service to mankind. Let's be clear, the point of a book is more than the words on the page. A human voice brings warmth to the reading, and allows the reader and the read to to establish a connection to pass thoughts from voice to mind. Man is a gregarious animal and is hard-wired to enjoy time spent with another human. A book, the connection between humans over a written page, is truly a wonderful thing.

Babblebooks is based on a horribly technical view of what reading is, an overly Utilitarian notion of the value of words and their meaning. Words have meaning, but they also have structure within sentences and sentences within the paragraphs of a page. Sentences may yield to the strict rules of punctuation, but they also have context. A human reader can understand the flow of the story as it crosses a page and can imbue imbue its voice with that flow and the meaning that follows. A machine simply cannot do that. Dickens should be read by an Englishman. I would like to hear him read by the same people who read the weekly Economist.

Stay away from Babblebooks. Babblebooks is performing a more than a disservice, it is insulting great works.

I am going to see is I can get iTunes to delete Babblebooks from any personal preferences that I can generate on the ITunes store.