I bought a couple of Audiobooks recently for the long car drive back from Tucson. The first one I bought was a book called Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt, which is a fascinating book written by a computer scientist about human psychology on the road. (It is, incidentally, the perfect book to listen to in the car while you're driving.) The other book was Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw.

Now, Malcolm Gladwell doesn't have the best voice on the planet, but it's distinctive and generally very pleasant, and I was happy to see that he reads the entire book himself in the recording. On the other hand, the Traffic was not read by its author, but instead by a voice actor.

I'm confused by this. If you're an author looking to brand yourself, to make people interested in hiring you for speaking engagements (Malcolm does a lot of those), why wouldn't you want your audience to hear you read your own words yourself? Call it personal branding. As an author, I would think you'd want to build a relationship with your readers, and what better way to do that than to talk directly to them?

P.S. The Traffic audiobook is also abridged, while What the Dog Saw is read in its entirety. It also confuses me why they abridge audiobooks. They're much expensive than they should be anyway, and what message are they sending by selling a version with a bunch of material cut out? Doesn't that send the message that the unabridged version was superfluous in the first place?