LDProd/Getty Images/iStockphoto
There are times, such as a recent weekend, when I found myself slumped across my couch watching Sidney Lumet's 1986 political-PR potboiler Power while simultaneously skimming the Wikipedia entry for "Power (1986 film)," that I totally buy into those alarmist arguments about digital distraction sickness and the erosion of attention and how our brains are misfiring because of prestige cable TV, Netflix and iPhones.
The Internet is making us dumber! The ambient light of square electronic screens is irradiating our brains and making it so we can't read or … write … words … good. We should stash our smartphones in lockboxes and bury them in the yard and vow not to dig them up until we've all of us read The Brothers Karamazov by candlelight.
For the most part, however, I possess a sort of intuitive belief that the human brain is pretty adaptable, and that we won't forget how to read just because there's a new season of House of Cards to stream. So the ascendency of Audible, iBooks and other audiobook formats hasn't really bothered me on some basic, existential level. Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that "audiobooks are the fastest-growing format in the book business today," with a whopping 21-per-cent uptick in sales in the United States and Canada alone between 2015 and 2016. Such impressive numbers tend to carry with them the kernel of digital anxiety, and the looming threat that the arrival of the new marks the end of the old, and that it's only a matter of time before audiobooks displace good ol' fashioned, pulp 'n' ink codexes.
It is, I think, a false problem. And as Matthew Rubery's new book The Untold Story of the Talking Book illustrates, it's not even an especially new one. The relationship between books and recorded books (or audiobooks, or "talking books") is a muddy one. As Rubery writes that "we still lack the vocabulary for discussing its relationship to conventional books, not to mention its uncertain standing in the world of letters." His book is, to use the lite-academese in which it is written, an "intervention" into precisely such issues.
A book about the history of audio books sounds like a punchline from The Simpsons. But it is, nonetheless, a rigorously researched survey of the format's history, engaging with the very sort of existential and ontological anxieties that still define some attitudes toward recorded reading. Stuff like: Does listening constitute a form of literary? What is the relationship between a printed book and audiobook, if there is one at all? Can a book talk? Does it even make sense to call a "talking book" a "book"? And so on.
Some of the most interesting stuff in Rubery's Untold History concerns the myriad ways in which certain authors intend to preserve the medium-specific integrity of traditional, codex-format books. Works by David Foster Wallace (whose mammoth Infinite Jest included hundreds of pages of endnotes) and Jennifer Egan (whose A Visit From The Goon Squad has a whole section rendered as a PowerPoint presentation) offer deliberate-seeming challenges to audio adaptation. Accents and regional dialects pose a whole other set of problems.
Another clever chapter examines the relationship between suburban sprawl, bedroom communities and the rise of books on cassette tape marketed to "commuters who were looking to fill time, not save it." One such motorist happily spent 10 months driving to and from work immersed in a recording of Winston Churchill's six-volume history The Second World War that ran some 147 hours.
As Rubery notes, the history of the talking book runs as long as modern recording technology itself (or longer, if you count the "bardic tradition"). When Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, he had designs on using it to record books. As early as 1877, The New York Times fretted that, "There is good reason to believe that if the phonograph proves to be what its inventor claims it is, both book-making and reading will fall into disuse." Some 132 years later and the Times' op-ed pages were debating the issue of whether the "flesh-and-blood actors" commonly employed to read audiobooks were being replaced by synthetic text-to-speech robots.
The lesson to be gleaned is similarly old-fangled: Technology determines how human beings engage with culture, and with the world itself. Soon, there will be synthetic voices to read for us and synthetic ears to listen for us. It won't be long before a compressed, Coles Notes summary of a book's thesis, central themes and choice bits can be downloaded directly to the brain's memory banks via Bluetooth implant.
But even then, I wager, there'll still be musty, marked-up, dog-eared books to pull down from the mantle and savour on the sofa under the glow of a favourite lamp. Just as long as there are still people who want to do the pulling, the dog-earing and the lamp-lit savouring.