Real Listener audiobook playback speeds

Randy McCarten
Apr 14
3 min read

Yesterday I went down an interesting rabbit hole. I am an audiobook narrator who mainly does fiction work. An author I am working with on his sci-fi book was reviewing some of the files and mentioned that the pauses where there are breaks in the chapters seemed a little long. These are chapter scene breaks. The scene or the character may have changed and I just wanted it to be fairly obvious to the listener that something had changed. As I had listened back to some of the chapters originally the breaks felt a little short to me so I went back and changed them all to about 2.5 seconds.

Why 2.5 seconds? Is there something scientific about 2.5 seconds? Ummm...no. It just felt right to me as a narrator. There are no hard and fast rules to narration that I know of. You just do you and hope someone likes it. I told the author I could go back and change them if he'd like, after all it's his book. I'm just the temporary caretaker of his story. In the end we decided to leave them as is. This got me to thinking about 2.5 seconds. It's not always 2.5 seconds. That all depends on what speed the listener chooses to listen at. And then I fell into the rabbit hole.

Earlier in the day I was watching some of the video replays from the recent Audio Publishers Association conference. One of the publisher marketing people got into how she loved Reddit. I was aware of Reddit, but didn't have an account and didn't know much about it. I went to an expert. Our 25 year old daughter. While she's up on a lot of things, Reddit wasn't one of them. I decided to see what it was about so I created an account. I am still at the "stumbling around" stage, but I asked the following questions in the r/audiobooks community. (There are about 200,000 people in the community from what I can tell)

"What speed do you listen to about audiobooks at? Is it different when you listen to fiction than when you listen to non-fiction? How long of a pause seems too long?"

Is this a scientific study? No. Is it anything that should be a new narration "rule"? Nope. Where the answers interesting? YOU BET!

When I listen to podcasts I frequently speed them up because I am trying to get the information quickly. And the speed will vary depending on how far my drive is while I'm listening or how much of the lawn do I have left to mow. What speed to audiobook listeners listen at? It varies...a lot. Some will only listen at regular speed to get the book as the narrator intended...good or bad. (As a narrator I gotta say I like this answer). Others like to speed things up a bit to 1.2x the speed. Others 1.5x. Still others say 1.7x, 2x, 2.5x. A few people even slow the books down a little. Some people even speed up their TV shows and movies. I didn't know that was even an option.

I found the sped up listening for non-fiction to make sense. We can still comprehend speech at very high rates. I was a bit surprise that some listeners also speed of fiction. One listener sped up "Project Hail Mary" to 1.2x and I believe a Steven King listener sped up to 2.5x. Steven King! Maybe you don't get as frightened as much that way. Everyone had their own preferences and no one answer is the "right way" to listen. You can follow the conversation on Reddit

To go further down the rabbit hole I wondered what a story I recently narrated sounds like at the different speeds. Below are clips from "The Shadow Ledger" by Owen Parr. Does it change it at all? See what you think. Like the 3 Bears I'm sure you'll find a speed that is "just right" for you.

Shadow Ledger 1.0x