AUDIO
BOOKS:
Are they an alternate form of book
or a requiem for reading?
by Jim Trelease, © 2001,
2006, 2007
including excerpts from The
Read-Aloud Handbook, 5th and
6th editions
 s Americans
spend more and more time in their cars, audio recordings
have become a major player in the publishing industry,
especially with the average roundtrip commute lasting 50
minutes. Why not use the time to enlarge your horizons
beyond the freeway? The recorded book is a perfect example
of how technology can be used to make this a more literate
nation.
Invariably someone voices the alarm that
such reading will make us a less-literate nation and that
listening is less taxing on the brain and thus the easy
say out. Believe it or not, that argument is more than
100 years old and therein lies a fascinating tale.
In 1894, sixteen years after Alexander
Graham Bell patented the phonograph and not long
after he'd begun work on moving pictures, an article appeared
in Scribner's Magazine entitled "The
End of Books." The
author, a European named Octave Uzanne,
was predicting a mass transformation of "story" and
the eventual end of books as we knew them. Soon publishers
would no longer be willing to go through the cost of printing
a book, nor would custmers be willing read it if they could
listen to it instead. It was predicted that authors or
their designates would read aloud the book to discs
to be heard by millions of former readers.
It would take almost a century before
Uzanne and his illustrator Albert
Robida would be proven
prophets—of a sort, but not 100 percent correct.
The book as we knew and know it did not die but their predicted
"story-forms" proved incredibly accurate. For
one, they foresaw the day when women would "listen" to
their romance novels while illustrations from them were
projected onto a nearby wall. If that isn't the TV soap-opera,
what is? (See Robida illustrations immediately below.)
Second, their predection that there would
be vast audio libraries from which the populace could
choose their titles also proved true—see www.recordedbook.com.
In fact, they saw the day when people traveling in pullman
cars (trains were really the most modern form of
mass transit at the time) would tap into a wall socket
to hear whatever book they wished. Today the daily commuter
can choose from hundreds of thousands of audio materials,
cross-country truckers have convenient stops that allow
them to refill their audio needs, and hundreds of colleges,
as well as radio and television stations are offering daily
podcasts. What makes the pullman car illustration so prescient
is that such a century-old fantasy is a daily
reality on nearly all airline flights as passengers plug
headphones into any one of a dozen channels.
The portability of future listening devices was
offered in an illustration of a hiker sitting atop a mountain
while listening through two white cords attached to
a small box strapped to his chest. Could this this be
Steve Jobs' great-great grandfather and was it from
him that Jobs received the inspiration for his white-corded
iPod? You'll find more on the Scribner's article
at:
| FOR
THE LATEST on Reading's
so-called demise, check out the opinions of
historian David
McCullough and The
New Yorker's Caleb Cain at BOOKS. |
Thus the modern doomsayers' predictions
of the death of books must be taken with a grain of salt.
The transformation is not much with the book but with the
multiplicity of ways by which we experience story.
For family or classroom use, audio recordings
are a big plus, in my opinion. And while it lacks the immediacy
of a live person who can hug and answer a child’s
questions, a recorded book can fill an important gap when
the adult is not available or is out of breath. Even when
used as background noise while a child is playing, its
verbal contents are still enriching his vocabulary more
than television would with its abbreviated sentences. So
by all means begin building your audio library with songs,
rhymes, and stories. Community libraries and bookstores
now have a growing assortment for all ages. And you should
definitely consider recording the stories yourself and
encouraging distant relatives to do the same and send them
as gifts. What could be more personal and last as long?
And might I add, for long family car trips, audiobooks
are the greatest "peacekeepers" short
of the U.N. Never mind the ad-slogan: "Got milk?" How
about
"Got audio books?"
| NEXT — Which
is preferable: Unabridged or abridged? Are audio books
"cheating"? |
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AUDIO
BOOKS
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