Abridgement

An abridgement (or abridgment) is a condensing or reduction of a book or other creative work into a shorter form while maintaining the unity of the source. The abridgement can be true to the original work in terms of mood and tone, capturing the parts the abridging author perceives to be most important; it could be a complete parody of the original; or it could fall anywhere in-between, either generally capturing the tone and message of the original author but falling short in some manner, or subtly twisting their words and message to favor a different interpretation or agenda. Compare/contrast with epitome.

A written work may be abridged to make it more accessible to a wider audience; for example, to make an adaptation of it as an audio book or a television show, to make a more convenient companion to an already established work, or to create a shorter reference version.

Abridgement is most often used to adapt a book into a narrated audio version. Because books written for adults are generally meant to be read silently to oneself (which is usually much faster than reading aloud), most books can take between 20 and 40 hours to read aloud. Because many audio book listeners are looking to more quickly listen to the information in a book, and because of the high cost associated with recording and distributing 40 hours of audio, audio book versions of novels are often produced in an abridged version.

Some party, usually an editor for the book's publishing company, will go through the text of the book and remove elements, notations, references, narratives, and sometimes entire scenes from a book that could be considered superfluous to the actual story or focus of the book in order to make its audible reading time shorter. A fully abridged audio book can span as little as 4 hours for a book that would span 20 hours unabridged.

The easiest content of a fiction book to edit out is back story often provided for characters or story elements that help support the reality of the story for the reader, but do not provide any narrative to the story itself. For example, a passage such as "John sped away in his automobile, a red 1967 Mustang he'd purchased from a junkyard and spent most of his college years restoring with his father" could be abridged to "John sped away in his automobile, a red 1967 Mustang" or even "John sped away in his car."

In a nonfiction piece, the most commonly abridged details are references, charts, details, and facts that are used to support an author's claim. While it would be unprofessional or irresponsible to omit such details from a book, it is understandable for an audio book as it is assumed the listener wants to hear the author's opinion, and if he/she needs to check the details he/she may refer to the text.

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