The Future of Books Is Audiobooks
Listening to books is more passive than reading them. That might be a good thing. 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. 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. Though mocked by some, Nymanovers vision of a book recording in a hat wasnt entirely far-fetched in 1883. After announcing the invention of the phonograph six years earlier, Thomas Edison turned almost immediately to the devices implications for literature. He hoped to open a publishing house in New York that would sell novels recorded on six-inch circular plates. The advantages of such books over those printed, Edison wrote, are too readily seen to need mention. And Edison wasnt the only one who thought listening to books would be obviously superior to reading. An 1885 essay in the influential British literary magazine The Nineteenth Century maintained that Nymanovers 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. It took a full century, but the technology finally did catch up to Nymanovers 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. Prominent literary figures tended to be particularly skeptical of listening to books. Strangely, the problem with the audio format was not that it made books less enjoyable. It was the opposite: Audio made books so relaxing and pleasurable that a listener couldnt engage critically with the text in a way a serious reader should. 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. 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 Edisons 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 Toibin 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 hasnt 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, its 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 doesnt, 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 Im less sure about is whether thats such a bad thing. L ike 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 Id 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 myselfI had internalized the stigma so deeply that even entertaining the possibility felt hereticalbut, 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, Id 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 Gyllenhaals 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! Read: An ode to being read to Was I being seduced? Was I missing out on the wisdom these great authors had to offer by listening instead of reading? Maybe. Theres 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 its one thing to comprehend a book and another to think deeply about what youve comprehended. And Willingham, of the University of Virginia, told me theres good reason to suspect that reading books does, indeed, lend itself to more intense critical engagement than listening to books does. In one small study , college students were randomly assigned to either read a 3,330-word article or listen to a 22-minute podcast on a scientific topic. Two days later, when the researchers quizzed the students on the topic, those who had read the article did much better than the podcast listeners. When youre reading, Willingham explained, youre in full control of the pace. You can stop and think before moving ahead. Audiobooks, he said, make that harder to do. Maryanne Wolf, a literacy scholar at UCLAs school of education and information studies, likewise told me that although she sees advantages and disadvantages to various different book formats, readingspecifically reading on a printed pageis best for understanding something at a deeper level. Audiobook skeptics are probably right. Listening to a novel will never be a substitute for reading, if the aim is to digest and analyze what were reading. Harold Bloom, the late critic and literary scholar, told The New York Times in 2005 that, for deep reading, you need the text in front of you in order to engage the whole cognitive process. And can we really argue with this? The harder question is whether we truly want to engage the whole cognitive process when we read novels or whether we want to be fully immersed in what were reading without the interruptions of our own thoughts, no matter how insightful. The harder question, put another way, is whether art should ultimately make us think deeply or feel deeply. Fiction, which lies at the intersection of style and content, makes this question particularly tricky. Theres the music of the language, and also the concepts and ideas communicated through the music. Theres the story itself, and also all of the signs and symbols beneath it. As the critic James Wood says in How Fiction Works , when it comes to literature, everything is at once a moral question and a formal one. The style and substance of a novel, of course, can never be fully disentangled. Someone who reads with more attention to a novels content doesnt entirely miss out on its music, and someone who is drawn to a novels style is still fully capable of thinking about the scope of the books ideas. Reading, by allowing us to stop and ponder, might tilt the needle a little more toward content, but listening, by harnessing the emotional power of the human voice, might tilt the needle a little more toward style. T he content of a novel is typically what dominates the discussion, particularly in the classroom, but that might be only because its so much easier to talk about. We ask young readers to focus on a books themes, to write essays on what this or that image symbolizes, as though a literary work were merely a code containing hidden information. A novel, in the process, is often stripped for parts as opposed to appreciated as a form of entertainment. Classroom lessons that focus more on style do little to solve this problem. Attention to how a writer makes use of foreshadowing or constructs a particularly brilliant metaphor cant capture what the novelist and essayist Mary Gaitskill describes as a books inner weave. She notes that this aspect of the novel is almost impossible to talk about, and yet it determines what the work is about as much as the plot or the theme or even the characters. Gaitskill compares the inner weave of a novel to a persons unconscious. I think of it as the rhythms of another mind, an animating intelligence that I want to spend time with less because of what it is thinking than the way it is thinking. Read: A podcast about the airport best sellers we cant escape This anxiety about overanalysis is hardly new. Nearly 60 years ago, Susan Sontag described interpretation as the revenge of the intellect upon art. Whats new is the growing popularity of the audiobook and its potential to change the way we approach the novel. Some great filmmakers, Sontag pointed out, had avoided heavy-handed theoretical interpretations of their creations by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be ... just what it is. Though there is certainly plenty of theory about film, I suspect that a film may be somewhat less susceptible to interpretation than a printed novel not because film is a visual medium but because a film dictates its own pace. When youre watching a movie, you have little time to stop and think. And though one could repeatedly hit Pause when watching at home, few would find it an enjoyable way to experience art. The true promise of the audiobook, Ive come to think, may be that it brings the momentum of television and film to literature. By propelling us forward and keeping the intellect a little bit at bay, the audiobook allows the novel, too, to be just what it is. Listening is a more passive experience than reading, yes, but, for many, its also a more relaxing and pleasurable experience. And the pleasure cant be overlooked. As the literary critic Laura Miller put it to me, Why would you even care about allusions or techniques if you dont actually enjoy novels to begin with? Utopian visions dont often come to fruition. But the 19th-century fantasy whispering machines that could narrate books arrived almost exactly as the futurists predictedminus, fortunately, having to be placed under our hats. At a moment when fewer and fewer students are choosing to major in English , an unapologetic embrace of audiobooks may be exactly what the literary world needs. After all, the public, as sales figures show, is making its fondness for them clear. Those who love the novel and want our children to love it as well would be wise to listen.