Great Changes on Medium — All Stories Get Audio Versions

Medium gives us authors and readers audio versions of everything we publish and read on Medium

Great Changes on Medium — All Stories Get Audio Versions

Medium offers audio versions of my novel chapters

In 2021, I published most of the 50 chapters in the novel The Love We Had on Medium, in the publication ILLUMINATION Book Chapters. Now Medium has made an audiobook of my novel! Not just of my novel, of course.

Medium has made this change for everyone who publishes on Medium, so that all authors can now hear audio versions of everything they publish on Medium, and all readers can listen to audio versions of all published material.

Chapters of the novel The Love We Had published on Medium can be read and listened to here:

And here’s a link to the Amazon page:

Listen everywhere?

Audio version of stories published on Medium is currently only available on Mac and PC. It will be exciting to see if it becomes possible to listen to audio versions of our stories also on mobile phones and tablets. If that happens, we will not be limited to using a computer and we can walk around listening to audio versions of Medium stories at any time, anywhere.

This is a mega-leap forward when it comes to user-friendly features of digital online publishing. I am happy that I get to be a part of and experience this, because it encourages increased creativity, both as a writer and as a reader and listener.

Audio poetry

The fact that Medium gives us audio versions means that we sometimes have to think a little new about how we write. From now on, what we write will not just be read on a screen. It can also probably soon be listened to via all the different devices we can use to read and hear stories digitally.

One detail I have become aware of when it comes to editing poems I publish on Medium, is that it pays to use line breaks and standard line spacing in the poem, because in that way the poem is read in audio at normal speed, as this poem:

I previously experimented with denser line spacing, and it now turns out that poems that have this smaller line spacing are read by the automated voice at too great a pace, probably because there is a lack of line breaks between the verse lines. Here is an example of this, a poem I re-published on Medium in 2019:

The solution to this “problem” is simple: In my published poems I use line breaks and standard line spacing.

If the reader wants to compare how different line spacing affects the audio, here’s an earlier version of the same poem where I used “normal” line spacing and more frequent line breaks:

It goes without saying that the audio function, as it is today, is hardly optimally developed. Reading or reciting texts (fiction or facts, poems, excerpts from short stories or novels, etc.) is in itself an art that only good actors fully master. An automated, artificial narrator’s voice can never outcompete a talented actor who, with great empathy and pathos, performs a written work of art. But for its particular use, including making the Medium stories easily accessible to readers, this new feature on Medium is superb.

Att. Medium

One issue that I think would be interesting to improve is to make it easier for readers to pause or stop the audio. Sometimes readers just want to listen to a smaller part of the audio, and then, if one wants to quit the audio, we have to click on the “x” to close down the file. It would be more practical if we could just pause or stop the file.

Anyways…

I think that Medium deserves a big thank you for further developing the experience we authors and readers have when we use Medium. Even before the audio service came, Medium had done us creative writers great services by facilitating simple and efficient writing and publishing at a high quality level.

2/2022© Øivind H. Solheim —

Øivind H. Solheim is a novel author and a nature photographer from Norway who loves writing fiction, poetry, essays, and articles helping others understand life, other humans, and themselves. He has published five novels, two non-fiction books, and a poetry book.

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