Audiobook narrators and reader credits

A narrator credit identifies who performs a particular audiobook presentation separately from the author and other contributors to its text or production.

The narrator performs an audiobook's spoken presentation. The author created its text. One person can do both, but the roles remain different.

For the fictional The Lantern Keeper:

Person Credit
Elin Ward Author
Nora Hale Reader of edition E1
Dane Rowan Reader of edition E3
Ivo Reed Translator of another textual edition

Searching for Elin Ward's books and searching for Nora Hale's readings traverse different relationships. Replacing the author with the reader because the audio has an Artist field erases the first route.

One reader or a cast

A single narrator can voice several characters. That does not make each character another person credited as a narrator.

A full-cast production can have several performers assigned to different roles. It can also have a distinct narrator who supplies connecting prose. Retaining contributor names and roles makes that description intelligible without guessing from the number of names printed on the cover.

A character name is a role label. The performer's identity remains another field. The distinction is the same one used in cast and crew credits.

Metadata conventions need a role interpretation

Schema.org uses readBy for a person who reads an audiobook, separately from its author relationship. Audio taggers may instead use inherited artist/performer fields or additional descriptive fields. Their presence does not establish one universal audiobook-role convention.

Emby's audiobook organisation uses descriptive information accompanying the resources. The imported fields and app presentation determine how reader credits are exposed. Where a description offers a compact credit such as read by Nora Hale, that qualified text preserves more meaning than a bare list of author and reader names.

See Also

References