Popular Author’s Next Book Isn’t a Book

Is consuming an audiobook the same as reading the print edition? For YA author Tamora Pierce, there’s no question about the power of audio. She believes so strongly in the format that her next novel will be released directly to audio as part of a bold new collaboration with Bruce Coville and his Full Cast Audio production company. Melting Stones, the latest book in Pierce’s Circle of Magic series will be released on CD and digital audio this month, with the print edition to follow in summer 2008, according to the author’s Web site.

At the New York School Library Media Conference held in Syracuse in May, I spoke with Pierce and Coville about this first-of-its-kind release. For Pierce, the shift to audio as the initial medium came quite naturally. After all, her background includes an eight-year stint in radio. In the case of Melting Stones, main character Evvy’s voice was so powerful that Pierce changed the novel from a third-person perspective to first person.

Although the book was written as a novel and not a script, the oral format resulted in a book with more dialogue than Pierce’s previous novels. “Knowing that a 14-year-old was going to be narrating resulted in sentences being more broken up and the tone being more conversational,” she says. I can’t help but note that these are the same elements used to craft books for a high-interest, low-reading level audience. Those students will benefit from having the same access to Pierce’s new novel as more skilled readers. In fact, the issue of access helped convince Coville to go along with what he calls “Tammy’s bold idea.”

Coville, the popular author of the Unicorn Chronicles series, sees a strong future for audiobooks, as well as other forms of audio literature. Case in point: Full Cast Audio is selling short stories by Coville, James Howe, and Walter Dean Myers in the iTunes music store. The hope is that students who are paying 99 cents for a three-minute song on iTunes will be comfortable spending $1.95 to $6.95 for a 15-minute to an hourlong short story by one of their favorite authors. According to Coville, this micro-marketing of individual audio stories only works in the digital format, where there are no costs for packaging or shipping. His dream is to open the doors to a new generation of readers through the technology of audio literature.

Still, is listening to an audiobook cheating? For Coville, the audio format removes barriers to materials and is simply an extension of our long oral tradition of storytelling. The format takes us back to the spoken forms of literature passed down from ancient bards and skaalds, says Coville. That a novel from such a high-profile author as Tamora Pierce would be released exclusively on audio for a year adds additional legitimacy to the format.

Despite having the support of two prominent authors, I don’t see an easy road ahead for audio literature. The digital technologies that make it more efficient to produce and distribute content also leave that content vulnerable to piracy. For his part, Coville describes digital rights management (DRM)—attempts to protect digital content by restricting access—as ineffective, noting that if a person wants to bypass DRM, he will. On the other hand, Coville is frustrated by “a certain group of technologically adept people who think that all content should be free.” Pierce suggests that we “just get over [DRM] because people that are going to pay for books will, and for the others, it doesn’t matter if they are protected or not.”

As someone who grew up reading Pierce’s books in the 1980s, I’m very excited to see her on the leading edge of new technologies. Although there are certainly challenges, I have been a delighted reader of ebooks and an engaged listener of digital audiobooks for almost 10 years. While the format has advanced a great deal, having a book released directly to audio—which also means directly to iTunes—will be a huge leap forward. Are you ready to jump?