Yesterday I read a book for 10 hours.
When I say read, what I actually mean is that the book was read to me. I'm not illiterate, and my sight is fine - but audiobooks have recently become an all-consuming obsession.
Forget the paper versus digital book battle – audio books have the advantage over both text-based formats.
I love reading and books, so much so that I made a career around them. Books are an excellent way of shutting out the world, which is very helpful for a recluse like myself. Books elevate our minds, and lift us out of everyday drudgery. But sometimes reading books can be less than convenient.
Audiobooks used to have similar limitations to paper books – trapped inside the physical technology of tapes or CDs, they were really only feasible in an automobilised listening device – ie, a car. But now thanks to digital audio, the ubiquity of smart phones and the ease and speed of downloads, audiobooks are now more popular than ever.
Audiobooks are not a new phenomenon. They’ve been around for as long as we’ve had radio technology – some would say longer. Oral storytelling culture evolved far before the printed word came into existence. Perhaps the reason I enjoy having a book read to me harks back to childhood, when my parents read to me before bed.
Or perhaps it is embedded in human culture from many thousands of years ago, when early humans first began to use language to communicate.
And now once again the evolution of technology is bringing sound and performance back to literature on a large scale, making it more accessible to a wider audience than ever.
For the sake of clarity, assume audiobooks are strictly books that are read out loud, directly from the page. We are not talking about dramatisations or abridgements. As audiobook fan Stephen King said back in 2007, “abridgements should be taken out and hung from the nearest lamppost.”
King has defended audiobooks against those who argue that you can’t claim to have read a book if what you actually did was listen to it. He points out that audio is merciless. A sentence read out loud can highlight it in a way that renders it naked. Perhaps audiobooks are actually a superior way of ‘reading.’
I must admit that I initially started listening to audiobooks as a quick and lazy way to fill gaps in my been-meaning-to-read-that-but-never-got-around-to-it library of the mind. Michael Lewis’ The Big Short. Nate Silver’s The Signal and The Noise – books that I’d never curl up on the couch to read, but that I’d enjoy learning from. I viewed them the same way I regard the economics and politics podcasts I listen to – entertaining didacticism.
Then I discovered Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies as an audiobook. I was bereft upon finishing the preceding Wolf Hall in paper – it was one of those books that you never want to end. And I had the same experience with Bring Up The Bodies in audio – consistent reading experiences with books in a continuing series, the only difference being the format in which I consumed them.
Yes it might be the lazy option. But it might also be what our reading habits are naturally evolving towards. Technology is constantly making our lives easier, and audiobooks make ‘reading’ fit into our lives far more easily than traditional books.
So before you start lamenting the new and weeping for the future of reading, purists, acknowledge that this might be part of a cyclical narrative of reading culture, and it might also bring readers back to books. Books that fit into our lives, while also taking us out of them.
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