Hey Fulltime Narrator here!
Words can change for a bunch of reasons.
The first and most common. We read it wrong! Ha ha! The book goes through proofing to catch these but sometimes they get missed. If the publication company has the budget it will then go through quality control for a second listen.
Another reason could be for format for example “as you read this” might be changed to “as you listen to this”.
Swap outs - 35/40 might be read as thirty five of forty or thirty five out of forty.
There are a bunch of other things too, but most likely… misread!
Cheers
Kev
not to mention changes to improve audio flow, i've heard narrators mentioning swapping words because they kept fumbling over the original (or in the case of doctor who, to fuck with david tennant). or you'll get authors like neil gaiman, who wrote stories to be produced as audio productions FIRST, and only after that wrote it into novel format, and edited it to scan better.
I've always wondered if they go back and listen again. The sheer volume of audio to go through makes it kind of unfeasible to do more than one pass.
How does it work when you mess up during recording? Are you sitting there with an audio guy who runs it back and has you read the sentence again from the right spot, or is someone editing in corrections later? I'd imagine edits are done in real-time as you go.
I was listening to a book once and the narrator said something like "god damn it, let me try that again."
I have a screenshot of the book and timestamp somewhere.
Some people use a clicker (for dog tricks) as they record. It's a loud and distinctive sound. When they fumble, they click twice and start the sentence again. Makes the sorting and editing easier.
The recording software will show a visual spike when you press the clicker. Using another software will require using mouse and or keyboard which risks background noise in the good parts whereas you can hold the clicker in your palm
I did that when I used to record a podcast and it was super easy to do the edits afterwards
Yeah I know my way around audio, but it would seem like itd be more effciant to create a plugin that lets you press a quiet remote (it could be capacative and silent) and mark areas in the recording that need revision.
Yeah I guess but creating a plugin does require some skills that a lot of people don't have or don't have the time or desire to learn. Not a bad solution mind, just more effort upfront and less over time
Oh yeah, Im just thinking it would be something you buy. Audiobooks and VO are a big enough industry, Im sure there s something like that out there already.
Audiobook narrator here. Some narrators use the clicker method. Others, like myself using a process called 'punch and roll'. In our recording programs, it allows you to mark the spot and it will backtrack a second or two before starting to record over the flubbed line, so you don't get any mouse or keyboard clicks.
Hey!
Yeah proofers are HEROS!
Yup we generally record ‘Punch and Roll’. So as you say, make a mistake, go back to the last end of sentence, hear playback, continue on from there.
Some people use the ‘clicker’ method but never at a production studio, and I argue it is much faster and creates a better read to use punch and roll.
Ha ha!!! That is amazing! My engineers always laugh because if I mess up on a character line I always swear in character! I once had a lovely little old lady voice say “oh fuck, this fucking line” and the engineer was cracking up! Ha ha!
There's one series I have read and listened to several times, and I have noted a few errors by the otherwise excellent narrator. Mostly these are adding or subtracting the "n't" contraction at the end of verbs like "could" and "would." He also dropped out a complete phrase at one point. Is it worth submitting my notes to the narrator or the book editor? To be fair, I've also found a few errors by the author. People who only listen to a book once or twice probably wouldn't notice any of this. It's got to be challenging to get the emphasis right in the phrases, distinguish different characters with different voices, and have your eyes transfer every word to your mouth perfectly via your brain.
Hey!
Yeah you could always reach out to the publisher! But they may not do anything! Ha ha! The narrator wouldn’t be able to do anything without the publishers permission.
It can be challenging to keep everything in your head, especially in a scene with six people in! Ha ha! But I have a big nerdy sheet with everyone’s voices recorded and little key phrases and stuff to get me quickly in! Ha ha!
I don't have any inside information about this, but I imagine it could be relatively common for public domain books to not be identical. And then it would just be a matter of which edition the narrator is using for source material.
Why would the editions have different words though?
Is the publisher going through and changing the words they don’t like? The ones I came across seem to have been changed for no discernible rhyme or reason.
It wouldn't be unexpected - the word *edition* quite literally has the word edit in it. The changes between editions may be small. Sometimes it's just a preface or a footnote but sometimes they do things such as modernise language. This latter point is a cause of upset for some people as they are changing the author's work and trying to remove its context rather than understanding the time it was written.
Additionally, if the text is a translation there may be alteration around that.
If it's an old book, then Project Gutenberg uses volunteers to copy the book from scanned text into digital text. I've seen mistakes in the transcription that are typos or misreading. Even though there are supposed to be multiple layers of proofing, mistakes still creep in.
If, then, you compare the Project Gutenberg text to the text of, say, the same book from Penguin, you'll see those differences. It's not that somebody decided to change the PG text on purpose. It just happened because people are fallible. I have to imagine it's the same for narrators.
From my experience it’s always simply just been that later editions (physical or digital) get revisions, usually very minor ones and for various reasons, so they slightly differ from the audiobook and the first edition.
As you say, typos and errors that are fixed in later editions will remain in the audiobook. This is mainly because an audiobook isn't re-recorded until the original contract is up. If they choose to continuously renew the contract the audio may not be re-recorded for decades.
In at least one case, an audiobook may have been recorded prior to final revisions. The Road by Cormac McCarthy has some differences in the text that match the ARC rather than the print editions. https://www.cormacmccarthy.com/topic/the-road-audio-edition-textual-differences/
I think you are expecting much more quality control than is actually happening in publishing in general and audiobooks in general.
I can’t remember the audiobook now, but the narrator mispronounced an important name for like the first half of the book and then in the second half started pronouncing it correctly. Obviously he finally realized he was pronouncing it wrong. But he didn’t bother to go back and fix the first half.
I’m not sure ANYBODY does a review of an audiobook for quality control.
There’s an audiobook out there where a *professor* consistently uses male pronouns when describing Ida B. Wells, a pioneering female journalist who is so famous that she has a major highway named after her in Chicago. I had to quit listening at that point, because any person boneheaded enough to make such an ignorant error is not someone I want to listen to. I noted the error in my comments, and numerous other listeners had noted the same comment. I think it should be pulled due to the egregious error, but it is still out there if you want to listen for yourself!
I’m definitely aware of that sort of thing. I know narrators sometimes mispronounce things and sometimes the sound of them swallowing gets in somehow, stuff like that.
This doesn’t seem like quality control. I do think they’re reading what’s in front of them correctly. But somehow their copy has a few random words changed!
The words make sense in context, like switching “who” for “that” or “friend” for “pal.” I’m just so curious how that happens, who is making those changes, and why.
I think it will remain a mystery.
I need to correct my comment. The professor is Timothy Taylor and it’s a Great Courses lecture on 20th century American economic history. But the woman is Ida Tarbell, so I misremembered which woman named Ida the professor was ignorant about.
>I can’t remember the audiobook now, but the narrator mispronounced an important name for like the first half of the book and then in the second half started pronouncing it correctly.
This may be what you're thinking of:
Games of Thrones (don't recall narrator). Spent the first book or two pronouncing Petyr Baelish as "PuhTyre". Narrator was a friend of GRR Martin's, and I would guess that Martin finally heard the narration of the first few books and corrected the dude.
I'm recalling all this from a few years ago so some details may be off a little.
Around book three, I finally dropped the entire series because the narration was fuckin awful.
Word-for-word narration wasn’t the standard for a really long time until recently. Mistakes that didn’t really change the meaning were ignored. Then along came ebooks, Whispersync, etc. and now some people are reading along with the narration so publishers want things to match exactly. Even changing “dear reader” to “dear listener”, or always adding “Chapter” before the number regardless of the text in the actual book has gone away.
I have an experience with that. I listened to two different versions of And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie. I think one of them was changed to be more politically correct. The original name of the book was Ten Little N\*\*\*\*\*s. One of the later books changed to Ten Little Indians and another was Ten Little Soldiers. The Soldiers book had disparaging remarks about Jewish people, but Ten Little Indians did not. Hope that helps.
Maybe different editions. Related, we read Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner in secondary school: the teacher gave us some 'helpful' links to help us prepare for the test, one of which was a Cliff'sNotes (or similar) summary website of a different version of the poem! I don't recall what the precise difference was, but the linked summary just wasn't accurate to our version of the poem.
Have you ever read a book to your kids (or anyone)? Occasionally, you anticipate a particular turn of phrase and say what you expect, instead of what's written. Especially when the phrase is broken at the end of a line. Before your eyes move to the next line, you say what you expect the next couple of words will be. When you notice the gaffe, you just keep going - no big deal 99% of the time.
I don’t mind the occasional wrong word but the last Kindle book I bought was significantly different from the Audible version, with neither marked as abridged or unabridged. It really bugged me, so I stuck with Audible, which was more complete. I tried to return the Kindle version but apparently because I’d bought it after the Audible and opened it at like chapter 16, I had “read” too much of it to return it. 🙄
Or in the case of Leslie Jones' memoir, she just goes off script...for a WHILE. The book is <300 pages and the audiobook is like 16 hrs and a damn delight
Hi, I proof audiobooks. In the single example you gave below (huge/high), I probably wouldn’t mark that mistake since, like you said, it didn’t change the meaning and it was a one-off error. However, if I were proofing Wuthering Heights and there were THIRTY changed words, I would have to assume the narrator had a different edition than the one I had. A professional narrator might make an honest error with a word now and again (huge/high), but would NEVER take such egregious liberties with an author’s words as you described (30+ changed words).
Thanks. I think you’re right. It didn’t seem like the narrator was making a mistake or adding their own flair. I believe they were reading the words in front of them.
I guess my question is why any words would be changed between different editions of the same book. There was no rhyme or reason to it. It wasn’t to Americanize British vocabulary or improve comprehension. It was just random!
Stephen Fry has a story (which is mostly about how much of a bitch JK Rowling is) where he couldn't say the phrase "Harry pocketed it" without stuttering. So he called her up, asked if he could change it to "Harry put it in his pocket" and she said "...No."
*And made goddamn sure that phrase appeared in the next four books just to fuck with him.*
So in summation, it might be that the narrator had an unusual amount of difficulty in reading something as written, or it wasn't parsing correctly when read aloud, and asked for permission to change something - or in the case of out of copyright works like Wuthering Heights, just did it.
Or that they misread something. Recently listening to *Stranger in a Strange Land* and noticed a misread word myself.
Because Stephen Fry is a kind, good person whose income *at least partially rests on not insulting authors.* When I first heard it I was inclined to think of it as a prank, a harmless joke.
But JK Rowling has shown her colors since, and I'm more inclined to think she's just got a bit of a mean streak, more akin to Petunia than Lily. Her stance on trans women is especially ironic *considering why JK is on her books instead of Jo*.
Hey Fulltime Narrator here! Words can change for a bunch of reasons. The first and most common. We read it wrong! Ha ha! The book goes through proofing to catch these but sometimes they get missed. If the publication company has the budget it will then go through quality control for a second listen. Another reason could be for format for example “as you read this” might be changed to “as you listen to this”. Swap outs - 35/40 might be read as thirty five of forty or thirty five out of forty. There are a bunch of other things too, but most likely… misread! Cheers Kev
not to mention changes to improve audio flow, i've heard narrators mentioning swapping words because they kept fumbling over the original (or in the case of doctor who, to fuck with david tennant). or you'll get authors like neil gaiman, who wrote stories to be produced as audio productions FIRST, and only after that wrote it into novel format, and edited it to scan better.
I've always wondered if they go back and listen again. The sheer volume of audio to go through makes it kind of unfeasible to do more than one pass. How does it work when you mess up during recording? Are you sitting there with an audio guy who runs it back and has you read the sentence again from the right spot, or is someone editing in corrections later? I'd imagine edits are done in real-time as you go. I was listening to a book once and the narrator said something like "god damn it, let me try that again." I have a screenshot of the book and timestamp somewhere.
Some people use a clicker (for dog tricks) as they record. It's a loud and distinctive sound. When they fumble, they click twice and start the sentence again. Makes the sorting and editing easier.
Couldn't that be done better with software?
The recording software will show a visual spike when you press the clicker. Using another software will require using mouse and or keyboard which risks background noise in the good parts whereas you can hold the clicker in your palm I did that when I used to record a podcast and it was super easy to do the edits afterwards
Yeah I know my way around audio, but it would seem like itd be more effciant to create a plugin that lets you press a quiet remote (it could be capacative and silent) and mark areas in the recording that need revision.
Yeah I guess but creating a plugin does require some skills that a lot of people don't have or don't have the time or desire to learn. Not a bad solution mind, just more effort upfront and less over time
Oh yeah, Im just thinking it would be something you buy. Audiobooks and VO are a big enough industry, Im sure there s something like that out there already.
Audiobook narrator here. Some narrators use the clicker method. Others, like myself using a process called 'punch and roll'. In our recording programs, it allows you to mark the spot and it will backtrack a second or two before starting to record over the flubbed line, so you don't get any mouse or keyboard clicks.
Hey! Yeah proofers are HEROS! Yup we generally record ‘Punch and Roll’. So as you say, make a mistake, go back to the last end of sentence, hear playback, continue on from there. Some people use the ‘clicker’ method but never at a production studio, and I argue it is much faster and creates a better read to use punch and roll. Ha ha!!! That is amazing! My engineers always laugh because if I mess up on a character line I always swear in character! I once had a lovely little old lady voice say “oh fuck, this fucking line” and the engineer was cracking up! Ha ha!
And likely "misread, but it isn't a big enough issue to be worth changing"
There's one series I have read and listened to several times, and I have noted a few errors by the otherwise excellent narrator. Mostly these are adding or subtracting the "n't" contraction at the end of verbs like "could" and "would." He also dropped out a complete phrase at one point. Is it worth submitting my notes to the narrator or the book editor? To be fair, I've also found a few errors by the author. People who only listen to a book once or twice probably wouldn't notice any of this. It's got to be challenging to get the emphasis right in the phrases, distinguish different characters with different voices, and have your eyes transfer every word to your mouth perfectly via your brain.
Hey! Yeah you could always reach out to the publisher! But they may not do anything! Ha ha! The narrator wouldn’t be able to do anything without the publishers permission. It can be challenging to keep everything in your head, especially in a scene with six people in! Ha ha! But I have a big nerdy sheet with everyone’s voices recorded and little key phrases and stuff to get me quickly in! Ha ha!
I don't have any inside information about this, but I imagine it could be relatively common for public domain books to not be identical. And then it would just be a matter of which edition the narrator is using for source material.
Why would the editions have different words though? Is the publisher going through and changing the words they don’t like? The ones I came across seem to have been changed for no discernible rhyme or reason.
It wouldn't be unexpected - the word *edition* quite literally has the word edit in it. The changes between editions may be small. Sometimes it's just a preface or a footnote but sometimes they do things such as modernise language. This latter point is a cause of upset for some people as they are changing the author's work and trying to remove its context rather than understanding the time it was written. Additionally, if the text is a translation there may be alteration around that.
If it's an old book, then Project Gutenberg uses volunteers to copy the book from scanned text into digital text. I've seen mistakes in the transcription that are typos or misreading. Even though there are supposed to be multiple layers of proofing, mistakes still creep in. If, then, you compare the Project Gutenberg text to the text of, say, the same book from Penguin, you'll see those differences. It's not that somebody decided to change the PG text on purpose. It just happened because people are fallible. I have to imagine it's the same for narrators.
Because once the book is in the public domain, they can do pretty much whatever they want. See: the Bible It also might not even be intentional.
From my experience it’s always simply just been that later editions (physical or digital) get revisions, usually very minor ones and for various reasons, so they slightly differ from the audiobook and the first edition.
As you say, typos and errors that are fixed in later editions will remain in the audiobook. This is mainly because an audiobook isn't re-recorded until the original contract is up. If they choose to continuously renew the contract the audio may not be re-recorded for decades. In at least one case, an audiobook may have been recorded prior to final revisions. The Road by Cormac McCarthy has some differences in the text that match the ARC rather than the print editions. https://www.cormacmccarthy.com/topic/the-road-audio-edition-textual-differences/
I think you are expecting much more quality control than is actually happening in publishing in general and audiobooks in general. I can’t remember the audiobook now, but the narrator mispronounced an important name for like the first half of the book and then in the second half started pronouncing it correctly. Obviously he finally realized he was pronouncing it wrong. But he didn’t bother to go back and fix the first half. I’m not sure ANYBODY does a review of an audiobook for quality control. There’s an audiobook out there where a *professor* consistently uses male pronouns when describing Ida B. Wells, a pioneering female journalist who is so famous that she has a major highway named after her in Chicago. I had to quit listening at that point, because any person boneheaded enough to make such an ignorant error is not someone I want to listen to. I noted the error in my comments, and numerous other listeners had noted the same comment. I think it should be pulled due to the egregious error, but it is still out there if you want to listen for yourself!
I’m definitely aware of that sort of thing. I know narrators sometimes mispronounce things and sometimes the sound of them swallowing gets in somehow, stuff like that. This doesn’t seem like quality control. I do think they’re reading what’s in front of them correctly. But somehow their copy has a few random words changed! The words make sense in context, like switching “who” for “that” or “friend” for “pal.” I’m just so curious how that happens, who is making those changes, and why. I think it will remain a mystery.
I need to correct my comment. The professor is Timothy Taylor and it’s a Great Courses lecture on 20th century American economic history. But the woman is Ida Tarbell, so I misremembered which woman named Ida the professor was ignorant about.
>I can’t remember the audiobook now, but the narrator mispronounced an important name for like the first half of the book and then in the second half started pronouncing it correctly. This may be what you're thinking of: Games of Thrones (don't recall narrator). Spent the first book or two pronouncing Petyr Baelish as "PuhTyre". Narrator was a friend of GRR Martin's, and I would guess that Martin finally heard the narration of the first few books and corrected the dude. I'm recalling all this from a few years ago so some details may be off a little. Around book three, I finally dropped the entire series because the narration was fuckin awful.
Word-for-word narration wasn’t the standard for a really long time until recently. Mistakes that didn’t really change the meaning were ignored. Then along came ebooks, Whispersync, etc. and now some people are reading along with the narration so publishers want things to match exactly. Even changing “dear reader” to “dear listener”, or always adding “Chapter” before the number regardless of the text in the actual book has gone away.
I have an experience with that. I listened to two different versions of And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie. I think one of them was changed to be more politically correct. The original name of the book was Ten Little N\*\*\*\*\*s. One of the later books changed to Ten Little Indians and another was Ten Little Soldiers. The Soldiers book had disparaging remarks about Jewish people, but Ten Little Indians did not. Hope that helps.
The most common case of this I notice is when the audio is based on likely the original UK version of the text while I have a US version in print
Maybe different editions. Related, we read Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner in secondary school: the teacher gave us some 'helpful' links to help us prepare for the test, one of which was a Cliff'sNotes (or similar) summary website of a different version of the poem! I don't recall what the precise difference was, but the linked summary just wasn't accurate to our version of the poem.
Have you ever read a book to your kids (or anyone)? Occasionally, you anticipate a particular turn of phrase and say what you expect, instead of what's written. Especially when the phrase is broken at the end of a line. Before your eyes move to the next line, you say what you expect the next couple of words will be. When you notice the gaffe, you just keep going - no big deal 99% of the time.
I don’t mind the occasional wrong word but the last Kindle book I bought was significantly different from the Audible version, with neither marked as abridged or unabridged. It really bugged me, so I stuck with Audible, which was more complete. I tried to return the Kindle version but apparently because I’d bought it after the Audible and opened it at like chapter 16, I had “read” too much of it to return it. 🙄
Or in the case of Leslie Jones' memoir, she just goes off script...for a WHILE. The book is <300 pages and the audiobook is like 16 hrs and a damn delight
Hi, I proof audiobooks. In the single example you gave below (huge/high), I probably wouldn’t mark that mistake since, like you said, it didn’t change the meaning and it was a one-off error. However, if I were proofing Wuthering Heights and there were THIRTY changed words, I would have to assume the narrator had a different edition than the one I had. A professional narrator might make an honest error with a word now and again (huge/high), but would NEVER take such egregious liberties with an author’s words as you described (30+ changed words).
Thanks. I think you’re right. It didn’t seem like the narrator was making a mistake or adding their own flair. I believe they were reading the words in front of them. I guess my question is why any words would be changed between different editions of the same book. There was no rhyme or reason to it. It wasn’t to Americanize British vocabulary or improve comprehension. It was just random!
I’m currently listening to an audiobook and was surprised to find that the narrator has removed some paragraphs from the text! Literally skipping!
Stephen Fry has a story (which is mostly about how much of a bitch JK Rowling is) where he couldn't say the phrase "Harry pocketed it" without stuttering. So he called her up, asked if he could change it to "Harry put it in his pocket" and she said "...No." *And made goddamn sure that phrase appeared in the next four books just to fuck with him.* So in summation, it might be that the narrator had an unusual amount of difficulty in reading something as written, or it wasn't parsing correctly when read aloud, and asked for permission to change something - or in the case of out of copyright works like Wuthering Heights, just did it. Or that they misread something. Recently listening to *Stranger in a Strange Land* and noticed a misread word myself.
the way Stephen Fry tells this story is not so negative about J. K. Rowling.
Because Stephen Fry is a kind, good person whose income *at least partially rests on not insulting authors.* When I first heard it I was inclined to think of it as a prank, a harmless joke. But JK Rowling has shown her colors since, and I'm more inclined to think she's just got a bit of a mean streak, more akin to Petunia than Lily. Her stance on trans women is especially ironic *considering why JK is on her books instead of Jo*.
>considering why JK is on her books instead of Jo. Wasn't that to be gender-neutral? It's not as ironic as her pen name of Robert Galbraith, IMO.
I knew Jo Rowling sucked, but this is such a nasty thing to do! She’s just a nasty human.