This is a response to Ella’s blog post titled, “Paratext and The Brothers Karamazov.” There are two strands of thought in Ella’s blog post — I would like to write on Ella’s first point, which is that a reader’s experience of a text can vary considerably depending on the medium in which s/he consumes it.

In reflecting on Ella’s reading of Robinson Crusoe, I was reminded of my own experience with audiobooks. I am not usually a fan of audiobooks as I tend to read at a faster pace, but there was one book that I made a point of “reading” as an audiobook and actually enjoyed — it was a fiction book titled Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Daisy Jones tells the story of a fictional band from the 1970s in a documentary-interview format. In the audiobook, various voice actors narrate the interviews, and they do such fantastic jobs that they give the reader a sense that s/he is listening to a radio documentary of a real band. But the performances of the narrators go beyond adding a sense of realism to the story. They shape the listeners/readers’ mental images, influence their emotional responses, and even have the potential to change their perception of character dynamics. While Reid’s words remain foundational to Daisy Jones, the interpretation and actual experience of the book relies heavily on the narrators’ expressive choices for each character. This brings us back to Ella’s point: the medium in which a text is presented greatly influences how a reader experiences and understands the text.

This raises interesting questions about where interpretation ends and creation begins and what we consider to be “original” works. Note that Fichte attributed “personal expression” not only to the author but also to the reader. He claimed that understanding a text involves assimilating the author’s ideas into the reader’s own mental framework and transforming the “form” in the process. This means that any derivative work could be considered an original creation. As Biagioli pointed out, this understanding of originality severely limits the scope of copyright protection, where only verbatim copying of a text would constitute infringement. The issue is whether audiobooks, which toe the line between verbatim reproduction and creative transformation, should count as derivative works. On one hand, this is a matter of acknowledging the contributions of the performers and the distinct creative labour that they provide. On the other hand, it may potentially mean diluting the original “genius” of the author — but maybe that is not a bad thing.

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