Question About "Adapted" Star Trek Audiobooks

[Starfleet Engineer]

Pardon my ignorance, but what exactly does "Adapted" mean for Trek audiobooks? I assume that "Abridged" means they cut parts out, but stick to the text of the novel. Correct me if that is wrong. Does adapted mean the text is changed and may not be what is in the novel?

 

[Christopher]

Does adapted mean the text is changed and may not be what is in the novel?

"Adapted" just means converted from one medium to another, whether it's from prose to audio, from book to film, from film to comic book, or whatever. Even a word-for-word audiobook adaptation still probably needs someone to rewrite it into script form with stage directions for the narrator, sound-effects or music notations, and such, so the person who does that would get an "adapted by" credit.

 

[David cgc]

There were at least some that had some amount of what you'd think of as adaptation. There would be new bits written from Spock's perspective read by Nimoy, with the bulk of the story read as a narrative by another actor.

 

[Christopher]

But the word "adapted" as used in credits does not specifically mean that the content is changed. That's what Engineer was asking, and the answer is no. It's just a term used for taking a story in one medium and redoing it in another medium.

 

[borgboy]

I'm pretty sure all the Trek books that are described as "adapted" on Audible are abridged.
Audible just does audiobooks. With a rare exception all of their books are "adapted" in that format but I haven't seen any unabridged books there described as adapted. It's an odd distinction that I've only seen on some of their Trek books.

 

[Therin of Andor]

The "abridged" audios are also "adapted for audio" because they have musical cues and often sound effects. The earliest S&S audios also rewrote sections of each novel to be Mr Spock's First Officer's Log entries, to minimise the time "Leonard Nimoy as the voice of Spock" had to spend recording his portions. Doohan's and Takei's sections were abridgments of the original text.