Image – Getty: Avid Photographer
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘Original Custom Art’
As Spotify continues to message various news media about its expansion of its audiobook offer, it has started flagging the feature branded “Follow Along,” highlighted by the release of Bruce Holsinger’s Culpability.
Our international industry readership can best grasp what the brand “Follow Along” means, if we tell you it’s like an “enhanced ebook” for audio, called by the company “an immersive experience that syncs time-stamped illustrations, graphics, and media with audio narration.”
In commentary sent to us on Wednesday (August 20), Spotify says that the Follow Along approach “elevates” the audiobook edition of Holsinger’s Culpability with “original custom art from several designers including Rodrigo Corral, one of publishing’s most celebrated cover art designers (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, 8 Rules of Love), that add a rich visual layer that deepens narrative immersion.
“More than 100 visual assets”—photos, illustrations, graphics—”were created exclusively for Spotify, graphics that appear as listeners make their way through the book. These time-stamped materials are also available in the ‘extras’ section and allow users to pick and listen to corresponding chapters of a given book.”
What sounds like perhaps a more audio-related use of this is in the Spotify deployment of Follow Along for Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series, in which “Spotify brought music criticism to life through [voiced], visually guided editions of titles like Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and AC/DC’s Highway To Hell.”
There’s potentially some branding confusion ahead, too. “Follow Along” at Spotify also means simply keeping up with artists, podcasts, and other offerings from the service, as when you allow any retailer to ping you about various availabilities from specific authors and so on.
But to make this a bit clearer, in this other, more recent, use of the phrase “Follow Along,” you watch your smartphone screen as you listen to an audiobook. That way, you can see the visuals being displayed in sync to wherever they should show up in the reading.
So what could possibly go wrong?
The Multitasking Argument for Audiobooks
Remember that in almost every survey of audiobook users you’ve seen in the last five years, the top or near-the-top thing listed by respondents as their favorite advantage of audiobooks was that a user can listen to a book while doing other things—household chores, working out, driving, and so on.
Well, if you’re glued to your screen, watching the images go by with the reading, then you may not be able to do all those other things you used to do while listening to an audiobook.
In his mostly positive review at Fast Company, Zachary Petit gets at this, writing, “Of course, like anything new, you’ve got to figure out the best way to use it—and while listening to Culpability, I likely no doubt missed certain visuals by virtue of not staring at my phone for the duration of the book, waiting to see what might pop up. Interfaces like Apple CarPlay also don’t generally display visuals like these so as not to distract drivers—so in lieu of something like an audible chime to check your phone or tablet for a given image, you may need to hop over to the ‘extras’ section of the audiobook to find what you missed.”
Re-Kindling?
Remember “Kindle in Motion”? You can still see some Kindle in Motion ebooks offered by Amazon here, although the branded presentation format doesn’t seem to have been continued to new titles for many years.
In chapter-opening artwork, the Kindle in Motion edition of Patricia Cornwell’s ‘Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert’ includes several eerie scenes. In this one, the proverbial London fog rolls past, revealing a startling red cape on one of the figures. Image: Kindle in Motion
A lot of readers were introduced to Kindle in Motion for the 2017 Patricia Cornwell release of Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert. This was hardly a useless endeavor, although some questioned the time and expense of making an ebook (Ripper or any other) “enhanced” with little embedded videos of London fog rolling away at a chapter title, etc.
Essentially, the Kindle in Motion effort embedded relatively small, atmospheric decorative and/or informational assets inline with the text of an ebook. While sometimes diverting, some consumers felt that the effects were underwhelming. In addition to the Cornwell work, the use of Kindle in Motion was promoted for Dean Koontz’s Ricochet Joe, and other
Like much of the “enhanced ebook” effort, most of these offerings faded rather quickly in attraction for readers, seemingly seen by consumers more as gimmicks than as the revolutionary.
Kindle in Motion was in play roughly 10 years ago, according to some records, and was a short-lived program of a few years, at least with promotional support.
Probably the cautionary position here is to note that past efforts to mix media—to make a hybrid-format delivery of digitally presented literature—hasn’t necessarily fared well. The entire “enhanced ebook” effort was short-lived, and the audiobook Follow Along effort to supply visuals to audiobooks may be seen (or heard) as counter to the point for listeners. About enhanced ebooks, more than one user was heard saying a version of, “When I want to read, I want to read.”
But it’s an interesting effort, it’s adoption may be stronger as enhanced audio, and Spotify has the resources to work on it and sustain it if the company is committed to developing it over time.
More from Publishing Perspectives on audio in international publishing is here, more on Spotify and its foray into audiobook streaming is here, and more on industry statistics is here.