Recently I read the following footnote.

17.   If you’re reading an e-book or listening to this book…

Which raises the question I’ve never thought about before: How do footnotes work in audiobooks? Does the speaker stop after the sentence to relay the footnotes? That might interrupt the flow of the text unduly. Does she read all of the footnotes at the end? The reader, or more accurately the listener, may have forgotten which sections each footnote corresponds to. How about at the end of every chapter or section?

John Green’s footnotes are numbered; does the speaker say the numbers out loud? “This book was printed in an air-conditioned facility. Footnote seventeen.”

More generally, how do audiobooks deal with nonlinear storytelling? Does a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure audiobook say something like this? “To enter the cave, fast forward to timestamp 42:12. To ride back into town, fast forward to timestamp 48:51.” Or do the audiobook producers throw their hands up in defeat and say to the publishing company, “Please don’t hand us anymore CYOA books, we have no clue what to do with them”?

I realise these questions can be resolved by trying out audiobooks and hearing what they do. (I’ve never listened to an audiobook.) But then I’d never write down these questions in the first place, and I do think there is intrinsic value in writing down interesting questions, even if they have simple empirical answers. I think How do footnotes work in audiobooks is one of those questions.

(Just looked it up: it turns out audiobook narrators almost never record footnotes.)