Audible brought Harry Potter’s bottled memories to life at New York Comic Con

For the last two years at New York Comic Con, Audible has been on a drive to demonstrate that audiobooks are an altogether different experience for readers than sitting down with a book. Last year, the company rolled out an impressive faux museum to support Andy Weir’s novel Artemis, complete with a lunar art installation. This year, the company is showcasing a familiar classic, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, with an installation designed to mimic the memories of the books’ characters.

Titled “A Harry Potter Pensieve Experience,” the activation is a clever reminder that reading and listening are two very different activities. In Harry Potter’s world, the Pensieve is a way to access someone’s memories: a wizard extracts them from their mind with a wand, and they can store them at will. This experience replicates that: attendees select a vial containing the “memories” of a character — which is really a color-coded dot pasted on the bottom — when they enter. The exhibit isn’t huge, but it contains several stations equipped with a set of headphones and a place to slot in the vial. The computer dutifully figures out which character you have, and at each station, it reads a different excerpt from one of the novels. A screen in front of you flashes with an abstract bit of animation that matches the mood of the excerpt that you’re listening to.

This particular exhibit isn’t something that has any practical purpose beyond advertising the Harry Potter novels to a group of people predisposed to enjoy the series, but it highlights a differentiating point that Audible is able to deliver to readers: listening to an audiobook is more than just hearing the story; it’s also listening to the performance of the narrator.

The exhibit adds in some extra sound and lighting to enhance the mood, playing into the lines of the story that you listen to. In recent years, Audible has launched some interesting experiments, from using machine learning to bring listeners to the good parts of romance novels and an entire line of audio originals. Most audiobooks are a rote reading of the source text, allowing you to catch up on books while you’re in the car or exercising, but audiobook companies are starting to add in additional effects to enhance the listening experience. For example, Random House’s Star Wars novels come with a complete range of sound effects from the films that add to the mood of the story. Even when those special effects aren’t present, the work of narrators like Harry Potter’s Jim Dale brings an additional level of performance to the text, which turns listening to the series into a very different experience, even if you’ve read the novels before.

Audible’s exhibit is a good physical demonstration of this. Even though it only showcases a handful of short clips, the performance and trappings of the entire exhibit showcase just how powerful an audiobook performance can be, and it helps explain why the market for audiobooks is growing so quickly: not just out of convenience, but as another way to experience a story.

Photography by Andrew Liptak / The Verge