Quote:
Originally Posted by ApK
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Have you ever fallen asleep listening to an audiobook, and you wake up some unknown number of seconds or minutes later, and you sort of kind of feel you still know what's going on in the story, but you can't really be sure if you missed something? That's how abridged audiobooks always make me feel.
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Well, I'm sure that abridgments are like everything else--there are good ones and there are bad ones, and there are ones somewhere in between.
The work of an abridger (the word has been flagged, but I'll use it anyway, since I don't know the correct term) must be a difficult one. It seems like he or she would know the contents of the book thoroughly before starting out. Then, as the book progresses, he or she forgets that he or she had expunged text earlier which referred to, or set the context of something that, comes up later. He or she keeps the words that come up later, but readers are left guessing what the text is talking about because of that mistake. That's one difficulty that I see in abridging and may explain, at least in part, the scenario that you described.