Recently, I completed an introductory statistics textbook for undergraduate students in the biological and environmental sciences. The textbook uses jamovi software for examples and practical exercises, and is designed to be useful for anyone learning undergraduate statistics or teaching a semester on the topic. More details on the book are in a previous blog post, so I will not repeat these details here.

The publisher, CRC Press, allowed me to keep a free version of the textbook online and retain all rights to an audiobook version of the textbook. I have now completed the audiobook version, which is available for free on my website and on Spotify.

I first attempted audio recordings while working on what would become a rough draft of the textbook during the 2023 spring semester. By this time, I had a been thinking about writing and publishing a book, and reading my own draft aloud seemed like a good way to edit and find any typographical errors. I also thought it might be helpful to have audio version of the book for any students who are unable to read the text, even if the audio was not very high quality. Given the number of equations, tables, and figures involved, a statistical textbook does not lend itself particularly well to an audio format, but I figured it was better than nothing for anyone who is visually impaired.

I greatly underestimated how much students would be interested in an audiobook. After the first couple weeks of teaching, I had requests for audio recordings of all chapters, including practical exercises. It was not just visually impaired students who felt that this benefitted them. Students who were dyslexic or ADHD also told me that the audio recordings were helpful. Some students had to drive a long distance into work or class and found the audio recordings useful to review the material. Students were completing the lab practicals while listening to recordings and reading along, and several explained to me that they found that listening to the recordings while reading the textbook helped them focus. I resolved to make a reasonably high quality audiobook version of the final textbook.

The final version is complete and freely available to anyone who wants it. Recording it presented some challenges. I found the most difficult part to be reading the equations, and there is a lot of ‘open bracket’ and ‘close bracket’ repeated to describe what is going on. For figures, I decided to read alt-images followed by figure captions. For tables, I decided to read captions followed by table column and row names (rarely, I read out the entire table when it is very small). I included relevant footnotes at the end of each chapter (this was the suggestion of a student; in my first version, I switched to a footnote whenever it was referenced in the main text). I used the best microphone that I could get my hands on, and I edited the audio in Audacity. Overall, the total length of the audio is over 12 hours.

I am very grateful for the students who encouraged me to do this with their positive feedback on the original version. It was not a small undertaking, but I do think that it is a useful complement to the text for many students.