Audiobooks Get a Boost
By Staff -- Curriculum Connections, 4/1/2007
You know the old adage—a picture is worth a thousand words. Now two audiobook publishers have taken that saying to heart and are offering visual content to enhance their products.
Listening Library is adding nonfiction titles to its publishing program. Taking advantage of enhanced technology, students will be able to explore the content of these titles more fully through the photographs, maps, and diagrams offered in an Adobe Flash slideshow. The publisher’s first nonfiction title utilizing this feature was Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s Newbery Honor book, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow (Scholastic, 2005). The audiobook slideshow contains more than 50 photographs from the hardcover edition and 7 additional photos.
Listening Library’s latest release is the audio version of Sally M. Walker’s award-winning Secrets of a Civil War Submarine: Solving the Mysteries of the H.L. Hunley (Carolrhoda, 2005). Using the interactive CD, students will be able to zoom in on the letters, diagrams, maps, and pictures that appear in the book.
In March, Scholastic Audio Group released the audiobook version of Brian Selznick’s debut novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic, 2007) with a bonus DVD. Hugo, the main character in this story set in 1930s Paris, is an orphan, a clock keeper, and a thief who lives within the walls of a busy train station, and his livelihood and secret are put in jeopardy in this spellbinding mystery.
For the Scholastic Audio Group, the challenge was to create an audiobook for a novel that contains pictorial narrative. The solution was sound sequences that mimic the techniques of old radio shows. As the author put it, “…it’s almost like translating the story from one language to another, but the languages are pictures and sounds.” The audiobook is narrated by Jeff Woodman. The superb bonus DVD, hosted by Selznick, features a visual tour of the more than 300 pages of book illustrations as well as background information on the author’s influences, inspirations, techniques, and characters.
