[ed. Adventures in non-reading.]
It took a full century, but the technology finally did catch up to Nymanover’s vision of a world in which people could walk down the street listening to books. And yet, by the time portable cassette players became ubiquitous in the 1980s, the mood about listening to books had changed in a way that would have surprised 19th-century audio enthusiasts. Listening to novels no longer seemed like a utopian fantasy at all. To most, it seemed entirely unappealing. In a 1993 Wall Street Journal article on stagnating audiobook sales, one Random House executive lamented that “too many people still think audio books are only for the blind.”
According to Matthew Rubery, the author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book, a fascinating history of the audiobook, the notion that listening to a book is too absorbing to lend itself to deep reflection is the “most enduring critique” of the format. “It was striking to me when I began researching audiobooks how many people in Edison’s time welcomed efforts to make books more entertaining,” Rubery, a literature professor at Queen Mary University of London, told me. “The idea of books needing to be hard work, difficult, and read firsthand in order to be deemed valuable only took hold in the next century.”
That audiobooks have tended to produce anxiety in literary critics is perhaps not surprising. As film and television became the dominant modes of storytelling in the 20th century, book lovers were forced into a defensive crouch, left to argue that the very aspects of reading that made it more rigorous than watching a movie or a show were, in fact, precisely what made reading superior. Audiobooks were suspect because they turned reading into an easier, more passive experience. As the Irish novelist and critic Colm Tóibín once put it, the difference between reading a book and listening to a book was “like the difference between running a marathon and watching a marathon on TV.”
The stigma associated with audiobooks hasn’t gone away since The Wall Street Journal published its 1993 article on audiobooks’ failure to catch on. Daniel T. Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia who studies reading, says that the most common question he gets is whether listening to an audiobook for a book club is “cheating.” But if anxiety surrounding audiobooks lingers, it’s no longer stopping Americans from purchasing them. Audiobook sales have seen double-digit increases each year since 2012. Last year, the increase was 10 percent, amounting to $1.8 billion in sales. The trend is only likely to accelerate in the years ahead given that Spotify recently made a major push into the market, and Google and Apple are racing to produce AI-narrated books. (Even the dead can now narrate audiobooks.)
Still, if the audiobook moment has arrived, that doesn’t, of course, mean that all of the concerns about the format have been misplaced. I suspect that listening to a novel truly is less likely to elicit critical engagement. What I’m less sure about is whether that’s such a bad thing.
Like many fans of the format, I turned to audiobooks out of convenience. I was teaching a graduate course on contemporary American writers at Johns Hopkins, and it occurred to me that speeding through audio editions of the novels and memoirs I’d assigned could be a good way to refresh my memories of the books in the days before a class. But, along the way, something happened that surprised me: I started to fall in love with the audio novel. It took me a little while to admit it to myself—I had internalized the stigma so deeply that even entertaining the possibility felt heretical—but, in many cases, I was enjoying the books even more when listening to them.
The next surprise arrived when I began listening to audiobooks in bed. In recent years, I’d been reading much less at night. Exhausted from long days of parenting and emailing and Zooming, I would often end up watching a TV show I was not at all excited to watch rather than reading a book I was genuinely excited to read. Then, one night, I put in my earbuds and downloaded Maggie Gyllenhaal’s wonderful narration of Anna Karenina. Listening to a skilled actor read a literary masterpiece was every bit as blissful as the 19th-century utopians had imagined. “Netflix and chill” became “Tolstoy and chill,” and then “Jane Austen and chill,” “James Baldwin and chill,” “Kafka and chill!”
Was I being seduced? Was I missing out on the wisdom these great authors had to offer by listening instead of reading? Maybe. There’s not a lot of science on the differences between reading and listening to books. The existing research suggests that adults score the same on reading-comprehension tests whether they read or listen to a passage. But it’s one thing to comprehend a book and another to think deeply about what you’ve comprehended. And Willingham, of the University of Virginia, told me there’s good reason to suspect that reading books does, indeed, lend itself to more intense critical engagement than listening to books does.
by Sam Apple, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: The Atlantic/Getty
