In recent years, the boom of audiobooks, podcasts, Kindles, and other paperless reading practices has reached new heights. Given their rapid increase in popularity, I wanted to look at how these new modes of reading might be changing – and perhaps quietly eroding – our literary habits.
We might begin by asking the question: what is a story? Can a story come in any form, and does the form change the story at all? Nowadays, stories are available in a plethora of mediums – sometimes the very same story comes in paperback, audiobook, cinematographic, and musical form. How might these different forms affect our consumption of what is, at its core, the same story?
There are a few obvious differences between the traditional paperback and modern digital offerings. Firstly, the feature set of online reading is vast and often over-determined – we don’t need a book with Bluetooth capabilities. Some features are useful – no need for a reading light, easy highlighting, progress bars to incentivise longer periods of reading – but the digital literary experience is vastly different from the timeless simplicity of the paperback. There is something grounding and authentic about the streamlined, paper feel of an old book. Here we see the first quiet disruption of the reading experience.
Books are often thought of as an escape from the algorithm, or perhaps from the stresses of everyday life. It’s because a book is a one-dimensional thing: when you have in your bag a copy of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the only thing you have to read is Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Obvious as it is, this is key to the cathartic effect of reading – you focus your attention on just one thing, get lost in a single story, and do all that mental transportation without looking at a single screen. This is what the e-reader ignores about the experience of reading literature.
The e-reader presents a Wi-Fi connected, ever-present library of every work of literature written by our species, available for purchase. This completely neglects the one-dimensionalism of what a book is supposed to be. It treats reading as an act of efficiency, focusing on the words alone: as long as the words match up, it’s the same as having the book, right? But if we focus only on the words, we ignore the materiality and the undivided attention that come with the physical book – the slowness, the commitment, the decision to sit with just one story.
I disagree with the idea that the format is irrelevant. I think that the fickleness of the e-reader damages the resilience of the reader, makes us less likely to stick with a challenging story, and makes it harder to commit to just reading. If reading must be dressed up in technological garments, it should still be about one thing: just reading. It should be about incentivising sustained attention, not trying to turn the literary experience into a subscription model and a profit engine. Businesses need to make money to survive, and the literary business is no different, but this must not come with damage to the habit of reading itself.
Audiobooks and long-form podcast series transform the literary experience into something handsfree, allowing you to “read” – or consume the story – while running, doing the dishes, or working. This again treats stories as things to be completed, ticked off, and added to the “Read” library as quickly and efficiently as possible. Why would you want to be doing anything else while reading, if the whole point of reading is to do nothing else while you’re doing it? Isn’t the point of reading to be distracted from the outside world, absorbed in something fantastical?
Of course, there is a clear benefit to audiobooks: for those who find reading paper text inaccessible, audiobooks allow them to consume their favourite stories without compromise. This is a positive addition to the enterprise of literature – promoting the global inclusivity of reading and story is always a benefit. It shows that the medium can open doors, but it also forces us to ask what kind of relationship to stories we want, once those doors are open. In many everyday use-cases, audio literature is being consumed alongside other activities, and this multitasking is certainly a corroding of literary habits.
In the technological era, it comes as no surprise that reading literature has been swamped by a plentiful supply of digital options. Clever, feature-full, and efficient as they are, I don’t think any of these mediums are taking over the literary sphere. I don’t think any of them will replace the simple joy of sitting down, totally unplugged, with a weighty book, turning carefully through fragile pages. I don’t think that’s going away.