All About Books discussion

Just wondering how many immersion reading (a feature of Amazon's Kindle tablets and apps where the text is highlighted as the audiobook is read) there are.

On a related note (and a much, much smaller subset) has anyone gotten immersion reading working for Amazon Classics' War and Peace? For some reason the audiobook only shows as 1hr 24mins long. I've tried force stopping, clearing cache and storage, deregistering/reregistering the tablet, and factory resetting it, all to no avail.

I'm afraid I don't have a Kindle, and my Kobo does not have a thing like this

Sorry Tom, I had a look myself and I can’t seem to access this feature at all.

Wow, I figured it was a niche thing but didn’t realize just how much. Thanks for the replies!

I tried it several years ago when I first got my Kindle Fire with A Game of Thrones. What I discovered was that I read faster than the audiobook narration so either I quickly got out of sync or had to speed up the narration to chipmunk speed! Nowadays I mostly just listen to the audiobook and refer to the Kindle edition only when I get to a passage that for some reason I want to concentrate on more closely (sometimes there are places that I can't take in via audio despite rewinding, sometimes it's a selection that strikes me as important or interesting that I want to highlight so I can go back to it).

Regarding your difficulties with War and Peace, it sounds like something that needs to be reported to Amazon rather than a problem individual to you. Hopefully you can get it to work eventually!

Yes. The audiobook narration is slower than my normal reading speed, but I think that’s a good thing for me. I think my retention improves when I read/listen for this reason apart from having the extra input. So even if immersion reading isn’t available I buy the ebook and audiobook anyhow. Some narrators (e.g., David Sedaris reading his own work) provide interpretations/nuances I would never have gotten on my own. I may not agree, but I like having the option. Lastly, there are certain authors (Joyce and Proust come to mind) that I would not be able to just listen to - their writing is so complex I’d feel lost without having a text to pore over. Not that you needed to know all that, but there it is.

Joyce and Proust both are good examples of authors that would benefit from the immersion reading! I did a juryrigged sort of immersion reading with Ulysses (before I had a Fire; I used the Text-to-Speech feature on my Kindle keyboard) - I don't think I would have been able to finish it without doing that.

Actually, George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo is the best case for immersion reading for me. (I just re-read it for my local book club.) With all the different narrators, it was great to be able to identify them by sound (the major ones anyhow) and that helped disambiguation immensely.