- #ARE AUDIO BOOKS BETTER THAN READING MOVIE#
- #ARE AUDIO BOOKS BETTER THAN READING FULL#
- #ARE AUDIO BOOKS BETTER THAN READING PORTABLE#
#ARE AUDIO BOOKS BETTER THAN READING MOVIE#
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. That audiobooks have tended to produce anxiety in literary critics is perhaps not surprising. “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.” “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. Listening to literature, the essayist and critic Sven Birkerts argued in his 1994 book, The Gutenberg Elegies, was like “being seduced, or maybe drugged,” a very different experience from “deep reading,” which Birkerts characterized as “the slow and meditative possession of a book.”Īccording 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 the opposite: Audio made books so relaxing and pleasurable that a listener couldn’t engage critically with the text in a way a serious reader should. Strangely, the problem with the audio format was not that it made books less enjoyable. Prominent literary figures tended to be particularly skeptical of listening to books. 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.” Listening to novels no longer seemed like a utopian fantasy at all.
#ARE AUDIO BOOKS BETTER THAN READING PORTABLE#
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.
#ARE AUDIO BOOKS BETTER THAN READING FULL#
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. An 1885 essay in the influential British literary magazine The Nineteenth Century maintained that Nymanover’s whispering machine would be a “boon to our poor abused eyes,” and also that when we read print, “one half the power of literature is lost.” “The advantages of such books over those printed,” Edison wrote, “are too readily seen to need mention.” And Edison wasn’t the only one who thought listening to books would be obviously superior to reading.
He hoped to open a publishing house in New York that would sell novels recorded on six-inch circular plates.
After announcing the invention of the phonograph six years earlier, Thomas Edison turned almost immediately to the device’s implications for literature. Though mocked by some, Nymanover’s vision of a book recording in a hat wasn’t entirely far-fetched in 1883. Nymanover called the device a “whispering machine” and suggested that it could be placed inside of a hat so that someone walking down the street or reclining in bed “could be perpetually listening” to great works of literature. I n 1883, Evert Nymanover, a Swedish scholar at the University of Minnesota, proposed a new invention that some thought would affect the future of humankind: a device that played recordings of books.
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