Swapped hardback only club rule for audiobook picks, now half the group shows up

Honestly, our club used to require everyone read the physical book, like we were some kind of literary purists. Then last March, two moms with newborns kept missing every meeting because they couldn't hold a 600 page tome. We switched to letting anyone pick the audiobook version for the monthly selection, and now we get 9 out of 12 folks showing up instead of 4. Has anyone else loosened their format rules and seen the group actually get more engaged, or did it just turn into everyone listening at 2x speed and missing the details?

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ruby_bell4711d ago

and honestly the 2x speed thing has been a total non issue for us. We made the same switch about a year ago for a member who had a long commute and a kid with chronic ear infections, and the whole vibe shifted. The people who used to skip because they "forgot" or "lost the book" now finish the audio in the car or while folding laundry, and they show up with actual thoughts instead of a guilty look. The ones who still want the physical book, and we have like three of them, just read along with the audio or skip it entirely, nobody cares. The real magic was that we stopped policing how people consumed the story, and suddenly the conversations got better because people weren't resenting the reading like homework. Now the only rule we kept is that you gotta have at least started it, and even that we don't really enforce. Frankly the group is full of people who couldn't tell you the exact page a metaphor appears on, but they can tell you how a character made them feel, and that's way better for talking about books anyway.