Abridged audiobooks: is it the whole book?

An abridged audiobook is the book with parts taken out. It costs the same credit as the complete recording, it usually has the same cover and the same title, and the listing often does not say which it is.

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This is not a complaint about abridgements. A good one is a real craft, they are often read by very well-known actors, and for some books a tight three hours is a better evening than an honest eleven. The problem is only ever that you did not know.

How much book is actually in there?

Every abridgement below is measured against the shortest complete reading of the same book on Audible UK — one the comparison page accepts as the whole book, so never an AI voice, a collection, an edition in another language, a listing that calls itself adapted, or one whose runtime does not fit its label. That is deliberately the yardstick least flattering to the argument on this page: measuring against the longest reading would make every abridgement look more severe than it is. These are upper bounds, so the real figure is if anything lower. The most severely cut is Elizabeth McGovern’s Little Women, at 6% of the book: 1h 5m against 19h 2m.

One Audible credit each, the same as the full recording, in every row.

8 more abridgements in the comparisons are not in the table, because no honest percentage of one book exists for them: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, read by John le Carre (Abridged, six-novel collection, 15h 40m); The Jungle Book, read by Peter Jeffrey (Selection of three stories, 2h 25m); Bring Up the Bodies, read by Dan Stevens, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Anna Bentinck (Abridged, two-book collection, 15h 53m); Bring Up the Bodies, read by Dan Stevens, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Joseph Kloska, Anna Bentinck (Abridged, three-book collection, 27h 27m); The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, read by David Timson (Selection of four stories, 3h 44m); Carry On, Jeeves, read by Martin Jarvis (Selection of seven stories, 4h 50m); The Time Machine, read by Brian Cox (Abridged, 3h 34m); Animal Farm, read by Elizabeth Anne Harris (Abridged, 3h 20m).

Abridged, with nothing here to measure it against

These are marked abridged on Audible UK, but this site does not currently track an unabridged recording of the same book, so there is no honest percentage to give. They are listed anyway, because knowing it is abridged is the part that matters.

• A Week in December — Sebastian Faulks, read by Dan Stevens · 5h 35m
• Death Cloud — Andrew Lane, read by Dan Stevens · 2h 52m
• Tristram Shandy — Laurence Sterne, read by John Moffatt · 5h 3m
• Selections from The Faerie Queene — Edmund Spenser, read by John Moffatt · 3h 58m
• Truckers — Terry Pratchett, read by Tony Robinson · 2h 44m
• Dodger — Terry Pratchett, read by Tony Robinson · 4h 19m
• Stig of the Dump — Clive King, read by Tony Robinson · 2h 43m
• A Christmas Carol (Simon & Schuster Edition) — Charles Dickens, read by Patrick Stewart · 1h 47m
• The Day of the Triffids — John Wyndham, read by Alex Jennings · 5h 15m
• The Reluctant Suitor — Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, read by Lynn Redgrave · 6h 25m
• Mapp and Lucia — E. F. Benson, read by Miriam Margolyes · 3h 37m
• Archer's Goon — Diana Wynne Jones, read by Miriam Margolyes · 3h 36m
• The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Naxos abridged edition) — Robert Tressell, read by David Timson · 8h 43m
• The Hound of the Baskervilles (Naxos abridged edition) — Arthur Conan Doyle, read by David Timson · 3h 34m
• Winter in Madrid — C. J. Sansom, read by Simon Russell Beale · 6h 21m
• Corporate Bodies — Simon Brett, read by Simon Jones · 2h 37m
• Just So Stories — Rudyard Kipling, read by Michael Hordern · 1h 24m
• The Bear and the Dragon — Tom Clancy, read by Frank Muller · 5h 59m
• A Touch of Frost — R. D. Wingfield, read by David Jason · 3h 3m
• First Frost — James Henry, read by David Jason · 3h 39m
• A Killing Frost — R. D. Wingfield, read by David Jason · 3h 32m
• The Mirror and the Light: An Adaptation in 30 Minute Episodes — Hilary Mantel, read by Joseph Kloska · 11h 38m
• Stories We Could Tell — Tony Parsons, read by Matthew Macfadyen · 3h 26m
• The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins — John Pearson, read by Martin Shaw · 6h 7m
• The Man From St Petersburg — Ken Follett, read by Martin Shaw · 2h 56m
• The Mayor of Casterbridge — Thomas Hardy, read by Martin Shaw · 2h 23m
• The Last Legion (Film tie-in) — Valerio Massimo Manfredi, read by Martin Shaw · 4h 43m
• The Water Babies — Charles Kingsley, read by Bernard Cribbins · 1h 11m
• Thank You, Jeeves — P.G. Wodehouse, read by Martin Jarvis · 4h 50m
• Right Ho, Jeeves — P.G. Wodehouse, read by Martin Jarvis · 4h 48m
• The Code of the Woosters — P.G. Wodehouse, read by Martin Jarvis · 4h 58m
• The White Giraffe — Lauren St John, read by Ruth Wilson · 3h 41m

Marked “Unabridged”, but far too short to be

These are the hardest listings on the store, because the one label you are told to trust is the one that is wrong. Each is marked Unabridged and each runs at less than half the median length of the recordings of that book marked complete. At those runtimes they cannot contain the full text.

We are not calling these fakes. A wrong duration in a feed, a reissue of an old abridgement under a new listing and a straightforward data-entry error all look exactly like this from the outside, and we have no way to tell which. What we can say is that the number and the label disagree, and that the number is the one we would believe.

This is also why the percentages above are not measured against the shortest recording marked complete: doing that produced an abridgement apparently 289% the length of the book.

How to tell before you buy

1. Check the length against another edition. This is the only test that never lies. If one listing of a novel is three hours and another is nine, the three-hour one is not a faster reader.
2. Audible UK has no abridged/unabridged field any more. A few publishers still put it in the title — the Narnia listings read “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: Unabridged” and “: Abridged” — but most do not, so its absence tells you nothing. A description may say so, but not reliably: Tony Robinson’s The Jungle Book is marked abridged in Audible’s own listing data while its description calls it unabridged. Runtime is the signal you can actually rely on.
3. Be most careful with famous names. Abridgements are commissioned to be performances, so they attract well-known actors — which makes them look like the premium edition rather than the shortened one.
4. "Unabridged" on a dramatisation means something else. It means the adaptation is complete, not that it is the whole novel. A ninety-minute radio play of a six-hour book can carry that label quite legitimately.

Abridged, dramatised, graded, synthetic

Abridgement is one of six ways a listing on Audible turns out not to be the book you thought you were buying. The others are graded readers for English learners, unofficial summaries, dramatisations, memoirs not read by their subject and AI narration. Each one is a legitimate product, never a scam; what differs is how clearly the listing tells you what it is.

All six, with examples →