For those of us who love audiobooks, it's great to hear about the growing popularity and increasing availability of unabridged audiobooks. The Galaxy National Book awards this year created a new category especially for audiobooks, and the winner was Louisa Young's My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, narrated by Dan Stevens. He's the star of the massive television hit Downton Abbey. Dan is a "long-term convert" to audiobooks and talks eloquently of how much he enjoys acting out characters in audio.
Downton Abbey, by the way, was written by Julian Fellowes a long standing supporter of RNIB's Talking Books and Chair of the Talking Books Appeal.
My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, is "a moving and brilliant novel of love, class and sex" set around the time of the First World War. The audiobook is published by HarperCollins and was available as a downloadable audio book from March 2011, the same month that the hardback and the ebook version (with text to speech enabled) were published. You can find out more about the winner and the strong shortlist for the Audiobook of the Year award, and listen to extracts from them at the
Galaxy National Book Awards website.
Congratulations to all involved!
RNIB is currently looking into how accessible downloadable audiobooks are for blind and partially sighted people. We will bring more news on this in the coming months. In the meantime if you already have experience of buying downloadable audiobooks, send us your views.