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 on a phone screen the word "Abridged" is easy to miss entirely.
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. 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 Tim Gilbert’s Wolf Hall, at 8% of the book: 2h 1m against 24h 15m.
| Book | Abridged by | Abridged | Unabridged | You get |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wolf Hall · Hilary Mantel | Tim Gilbert | 2h 1m | 24h 15m | 8% |
| Frankenstein · Mary Shelley | Michael Henrik Wynn | 43m | 8h 10m | 9% |
| Jane Eyre · Charlotte Bronte | Amanda Hale, Tom Burke and a full cast | 2h 13m | 17h 27m | 13% |
| Jane Eyre · Charlotte Bronte | Claire Bloom and Anthony Quayle | 2h 54m | 17h 27m | 17% |
| Treasure Island · Robert Louis Stevenson | Luke Evans | 1h 2m | 5h 53m | 18% |
| Guards! Guards! · Terry Pratchett | Tony Robinson | 3h 14m | 13h 29m | 24% |
| Small Gods · Terry Pratchett | Tony Robinson | 3h 13m | 11h 58m | 27% |
| Wolf Hall · Hilary Mantel | Dan Stevens | 7h 11m | 24h 15m | 30% |
| Unseen Academicals · Terry Pratchett | Tony Robinson | 4h 43m | 15h 9m | 31% |
| Thief of Time · Terry Pratchett | Tony Robinson | 3h 53m | 11h 21m | 34% |
| Wuthering Heights · Emily Bronte | Juliet Stevenson | 2h 41m | 7h 41m | 35% |
| Frankenstein · Mary Shelley | Kenneth Branagh | 3h 1m | 8h 10m | 37% |
| A Christmas Carol · Charles Dickens | Jonathan Winters and Mimi Kennedy | 55m | 2h 26m | 38% |
| Mort · Terry Pratchett | Tony Robinson | 3h 2m | 7h 57m | 38% |
| The Voyage of the Dawn Treader · C.S. Lewis | Sir Michael Hordern | 2h 22m | 5h 51m | 40% |
| Going Postal · Terry Pratchett | Tony Robinson | 6h 7m | 13h 36m | 45% |
| A Christmas Carol · Charles Dickens | Roy Macready | 1h 11m | 2h 26m | 49% |
| Alice's Adventures in Wonderland · Lewis Carroll | Gemma Arterton | 1h 2m | 1h 53m | 55% |
| The Hobbit · J.R.R. Tolkien | Martin Shaw | 5h 57m | 10h 24m | 57% |
| Nineteen Eighty-Four · George Orwell | Philip Glenister | 5h 51m | 9h 48m | 60% |
| A Christmas Carol · Charles Dickens | Patrick Stewart | 1h 47m | 2h 26m | 73% |
| Alice's Adventures in Wonderland · Lewis Carroll | William Rushton | 1h 46m | 1h 53m | 94% |
Same price as the full recording, in every row.
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
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 every other complete reading of the same book. 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.
| Book | Narrator | Marked unabridged at | Typical complete reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| A Christmas Carol · Charles Dickens | David Jason | 1h 18m | 2h 57m |
| A Christmas Carol · Charles Dickens | Bernard Miles | 37m | 2h 57m |
| Pride and Prejudice · Jane Austen | Christian Neale | 4h 37m | 12h 14m |
| Nineteen Eighty-Four · George Orwell | Tim Pigott-Smith | 1h 53m | 11h 29m |
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
- 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.
- Read the format line, not the title. Audible does print "Abridged", but it sits below the narrator credit in small type and it is not in the title.
- 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.
- "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 full-cast dramatisations, unofficial summaries, graded readers for English learners, AI narration, and recordings that are simply a different translation. Each one is a legitimate product badly labelled, never a scam.