Activated my Storytel free trial to check out its offerings. It's got e-books and audiobooks. Which means it's competing with Amazon (Kindle and Audible). How do you compete with a tech giant's cloud computing power and endless library? Importantly, in Singapore, how will Storytel (S$9.90 per month) compete with the National Library Board (NLB), which provides an amazing range of books more or less for FREE?
I don't use Audible (at US$15 per month) because I don't fancy 'listening' to books. I'm not an auditory learner at all. The biggest reason why I don't listen to new music with lyrics when I run or do things that require concentration, is because it's very distracting. While I cooked and listened to a few pages in a Storytel audiobook, my garlic and onions were scorched black in the pan. Grrrrrrr. At least the book was about cats, so it was worth it.
Providing competition is all good, but Storytel needs to up its game with its streaming servers and libraries. At this point, it's not even about the quality of the content, narrators or sound. That's a given, the easiest to fulfill when you hire good content people to populate the library. As an end user, I'm also looking for a swanky, savvy app, and I think Storytel's got some way to go. Navigation is simple, but the app is unstable. When I open up an audiobook at the same time as an e-book, it will likely crash. It crashed like five times when I first did that.
Listened to 'The Travelling Cat Chronicles' (first published in 2012) by Hiro Arikawa, translated by Philip Gabriel in 2017. 有川浩「旅猫リポート」Narrated in third person through the eyes of Nana the cat, we explore whether cats belong to humans or is it really vice versa. (Reviews here, here, and here.)
Protagonist Nana the cat was a stray adopted by human Satoru. Five years on, Satoru and Nana went to visit the human's old friends from childhood and high school- Kosuke, Yoshimine, and Sugi and Chikako. Through the eyes and thoughts of Nana, we learnt of Satoru's painful loss of his parents, and a few key memories from his childhood, and how his friends stood by him, and soothed his soul.
Satoru wanted to rehome Nana, but didn't explain why, seeking and discarding his options of humans who could properly care for Nana... till he took a ferry to reach Aunt Noriko in Hokkaido. There, Satoru and Nana stayed. Having a cat narrate this story, is simply fun! It eases us into a story that is more than about what cats think. I don't think I need to reveal the reason (SPOILER) why Satoru wanted to re-home Nana. It's a rather sad sort of reason, and it's precisely because Satoru loved his cat, that's why he had to do it. The last 45 minutes of the audiobook made my heart ache quite badly, and I had tears in my eyes. The tears didn't fall though. It's a story of death, dying, loss and love, of friendship and loyalty.
The thing about audiobooks, I can't simply bookmark the portion I want to extract and quote. I can't just flip it back to those pages. Arrrrgh. So I'll have to settle for a quote from a book review. In Laura Mary Philpott's review for The Washington Post in December 2018, she wrote,
I don't use Audible (at US$15 per month) because I don't fancy 'listening' to books. I'm not an auditory learner at all. The biggest reason why I don't listen to new music with lyrics when I run or do things that require concentration, is because it's very distracting. While I cooked and listened to a few pages in a Storytel audiobook, my garlic and onions were scorched black in the pan. Grrrrrrr. At least the book was about cats, so it was worth it.
Providing competition is all good, but Storytel needs to up its game with its streaming servers and libraries. At this point, it's not even about the quality of the content, narrators or sound. That's a given, the easiest to fulfill when you hire good content people to populate the library. As an end user, I'm also looking for a swanky, savvy app, and I think Storytel's got some way to go. Navigation is simple, but the app is unstable. When I open up an audiobook at the same time as an e-book, it will likely crash. It crashed like five times when I first did that.
Protagonist Nana the cat was a stray adopted by human Satoru. Five years on, Satoru and Nana went to visit the human's old friends from childhood and high school- Kosuke, Yoshimine, and Sugi and Chikako. Through the eyes and thoughts of Nana, we learnt of Satoru's painful loss of his parents, and a few key memories from his childhood, and how his friends stood by him, and soothed his soul.
Satoru wanted to rehome Nana, but didn't explain why, seeking and discarding his options of humans who could properly care for Nana... till he took a ferry to reach Aunt Noriko in Hokkaido. There, Satoru and Nana stayed. Having a cat narrate this story, is simply fun! It eases us into a story that is more than about what cats think. I don't think I need to reveal the reason (SPOILER) why Satoru wanted to re-home Nana. It's a rather sad sort of reason, and it's precisely because Satoru loved his cat, that's why he had to do it. The last 45 minutes of the audiobook made my heart ache quite badly, and I had tears in my eyes. The tears didn't fall though. It's a story of death, dying, loss and love, of friendship and loyalty.
See, didn't I tell you I would stay with you till the end?
............
I am Satoru's one and only cat. And Satoru is my one and only pal. And a proud cat like me wasn't about to abandon his pal. If living as a stray was what it took to be Satoru's cat till the very end, then bring it on.
The thing about audiobooks, I can't simply bookmark the portion I want to extract and quote. I can't just flip it back to those pages. Arrrrgh. So I'll have to settle for a quote from a book review. In Laura Mary Philpott's review for The Washington Post in December 2018, she wrote,
While Arikawa did the imaginative work of translating from cat to human, Philip Gabriel, who has also worked with such authors as Haruki Murakami, translated the whole thing from Japanese to English. That’s a lot of translation, but only rarely does it get a little clunky. (During a scene when a cat gets into a disagreement with a dog, I felt a little like I was watching Sassy and Chance squabble in “Homeward Bound.”)
Are you unlucky if you’ve experienced a lot of loss in your lifetime? Or are you lucky because you had people — and animals — to get you through it? This book comes down on the side of gratitude, a testament to the good fortune we all have in choosing how to honor those who matter to us most. And it does so with a fablelike charm, without turning too sweetly sentimental or gimmicky.
It may make you cry, just a little, but it will also make you take stock of your friendships and ask yourself: If you could take a road trip to be reunited with just a few people from your past, whom would you visit?
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