I listened to my first iPod audiobook about two weeks ago, and I'm hooked. I'm the type of person who typically reads a lot of books at the same time-- ten, twenty, thirty, who knows. If I go on a trip I take several books with me. But I probably finish about 5% of the books I start, and maybe 10-15% of the books I start with the intention of finishing. Because I rarely finish books, I rarely read fiction, because with fiction books there's generally a pay-off to reading the whole thing, whereas if I read the first two chapters of, say, a history of the British empire, I've still learned something. I've probably read only 2-3 novels, at most, from beginning to end in the past year. Now, all of a sudden, I've "read," or rather, listened to, four novels in the course of a little over a week. (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis, and The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho.)
Audiobooks are not new. My mom has listened to them in the car while commuting for years. But the iPod is new, so listening to an audiobook on an iPod is an experience that's only been possible for a couple of years. A media revolution has been ongoing for several years now, and iPod audiobooks are not quite as important as, say, the internet. But the possibilities are still pretty striking.
What's revolutionary about an iPod audiobook is the way it reduces the opportunity cost of "reading" a book, and/or the opportunity cost of doing menial tasks. If I spend 1 hour a day getting up, dressed, shaved, etc.; 8-10 hours a day working; 1 hour a day commuting; 1 hour getting and eating lunch; 1 hour preparing and eating dinner; 1 hour on miscellaneous basic chores and errands; and 7 hours a day sleeping; that leaves me with 2-4 hours of "free time" to socialize with friends, blog, read, shop, etc., or, if I'm a family man, to spend with my wife and children. The value of that time becomes very high, and a book will have to be very good to justify my devoting that time to reading it. The cost of the book is not very important. The value of the time I'll spend reading a book will be many times the cost of the book, even in the case of rather expensive books, and even if I'm not particularly rich.
Now suppose that I have an iPod and can listen to audiobooks while commuting; while purchasing and preparing food, and while eating; while doing basic chores and errands; and while getting up, shaving, brushing my teeth, dressing, etc. It's not just that my time available for "reading" increases from 2-4 hours a day to 7-9 hours a day. The opportunity cost of "reading" falls by much more than that, because I can read during times that were occupied by other necessary auxiliary activities. At the same time, audiobooks raise the opportunity cost of other activities that can be simultaneous with other activities. For example, before I discovered audiobooks, I used to listen to music while getting ready in the mornings and while commuting, and at lunch I would often sit in front of the TV screens in our cafeteria and watch CNN. Audiobooks raise the opportunity cost of listening to music, and of watching CNN, and I no longer do much of the first, nor any of the second.
Audiobooks also raise the opportunity cost of eating meals with other people. If the alternative is to eat lunch by myself, eating lunch with a friend or acquaintance is almost always more interesting. Last week, a student from my old school, who was looking for a job in my organization, invited me to lunch. As a guy who's sociable in principle but doesn't, in practice, have many friends lately, this would ordinarily have delighted me (particularly as she turned out to be a beautiful woman). But, as it was, I was rather disappointed to be deprived of a chance to "read" my "book." (Of course, some people say they can read and eat at the same time. I find it too disruptive to keep looking down at my food.)
Since eating together is one of the characteristic activities of families, audiobooks raise the opportunity cost of having a family, too. I've reflected in the past few days that my desire to have a wife and kids has considerably diminished. Why sit around the table asking the wife how her day was and what junior did at school when I could be immersing myself in the great classics of literature? There are so many great novels that have been written. I'll never run out of them! And it will be very hard to find a woman whose conversation is as stimulating as the average page of the world's great literature. Partly, of course, this is a sour-grapes rationalization (my wife recently left me). But still.
Of course, audiobooks require a certain kind of concentration. When listening to music, one can let one's thoughts roam free. I've noticed that even if I say to myself This is a really great song and try to listen to it from beginning to end, my mind usually wanders. Probably that's because most of the songs I listen to, I've listened to many times before. Lately, I've found it hard to motivate myself to listen to anything other than Bob Dylan, for example. To "read" an audiobook, on the other hand, one has to concentrate.
I haven't decided yet whether aural "reading" is easier or harder than visual reading. If you're reading a book and your mind wanders, you just stop reading, and you start again at the place you left off. With an audiobook there's more "time pressure," as it were: if your mind wanders for a few seconds, you've missed something. So far I've only "read" novels on audiobook. I have a feeling that nonfiction might be harder because the narrative does a better job of hooking the mind to the story.
I wonder: Will writers start to write books differently, if they start to anticipate that much of their readership will be "audiobook" readers? Certainly it would, for instance, affect the relative merits of including conversation, or poetry, in a novel. An advantage of the audiobook genre, however, is that even though the iPod audiobook is, in a sense, a completely new medium, there's already a huge literature available, which needs only to be read and recorded by competent narrators, digitized, and sold over the internet.
Audiobooks also affect the opportunity costs of audiobook-complementary activities. Doing dishes, shoveling snow, shopping for groceries, commuting, and cleaning the bathroom, previously mind-numbing, can now be opportunities for the loftiest intellectual experiences. Interestingly, a wedge is driven between activities that are almost wholly mindless and those that involve a bit of concentration. If I don't have to think at all about a task, I can listen to an audiobook, but if I have to think a little bit about it, I'll get distracted and miss things, so I might have to turn the audiobook off.
This could affect the job market, separating audiobook-compatible jobs from non-audiobook-compatible jobs. Some bosses, no doubt, will forbid employees from listening to audiobooks on the job just because they can, even if it doesn't actually affect their productivity, but in principle the market should eventually discriminate: jobs where employees can "read" while working will be more appealing than those where they aren't allowed to, and employers who can do so without harming productivity will eventually offer audiobook privileges as a perk to attract employees. Also, self-employed people can adapt their work habits so as to maximize audiobook-compatible time on the job, and if employers are unreasonably stubborn about allowing employees to read audiobooks, self-employment will become relatively more appealing. Of course, there are already some jobs where people are allowed to read normal books. But far more job tasks are compatible with listening to an audiobook on an iPod, than are compatible with reading a paper book.
People may read for pleasure, or to gain useful knowledge. Do iPod audiobooks have a future as an educational tool? Of course, courses on tape already exist... Traditional classroom learning has, indeed, seemed like a technological oddity for some time, and yet it shows no signs of being on the way out. Why pay $100/hour to study at Harvard if you can buy the same lectures and watch them at home? What is the real value-added of the university? Since this is something of a mystery, I won't make a simplistic prediction that people will stop going to universities and learn by listening to iPod audiobooks, just because it seems to be technologically feasible. That said, the new iPod audiobook technology makes the opportunity cost for at least trying this new model very low. One senses that there's a major market failure here. It's quite possible that tens of thousands of people, working people who can't pay $30,000 to study at Harvard, are smart enough to listen to iPod audiobooks for 10 or 12 hours a day, while doing various audiobook-complementary tasks, and learning as much as the students of Harvard. If only you could develop a sophisticated enough system of tests to credential these people, employers should lap them up!
The remarkable history of text lies at the heart of world history. First text was written on clay tablets in cuneiform, and it made possible the bureaucratic backbone of the first empires, in Sumeria, and Egypt. Later, alphabetic scripts were invented and written on papyrus scrolls, leading to an acceleration of cultural transmission that underlay "the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome." Then papyrus scrolls, which decay quickly outside the Egyptian deserts, were replaced with durable parchments, which carried venerable works and eternal verities down through the centuries, making possible the astonishing durability of Latin, and Latin parchments became the medium of a lofty, beautiful, and fecund civilization of the High Middle Ages (misremembered by modern Europeans because they remember the moribund phase of that civilization rather than its vibrant phase). Then, in the 15th century, the printing press exploded across Europe; mass literacy led to a religious and social revolution, overthrowing the clerical class in half the continent; Latin was replaced by the vernaculars as the main vehicle of intellectual thought; and this fueled the rise of nationalism, first in Europe, later in the Third World when the printing press and mass literacy spread there. The most recent text revolution is the internet, which is giving the conversation of humanity a radically new shape, fueling globalization, rendering the old model of Westphalian national sovereignty obsolescent as English becomes a global lingua franca and new webs of transnational ties eclipse old national loyalties. The blogosphere is now transforming journalism and politics. Now, audiobooks have the potential to be a fascinating sub-plot in this latest media revolution, by allowing everyman to devote as much time to "reading" as formerly only an idle aristocratic elite could enjoy.
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