Audio Books in a Visual Culture

According to Andre Bazin, long before cinema was invented, it existed as a platonic ideal, a dream awaiting fulfillment. In a similar way, the Talking Book has long been prefigured. In Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyage to the Moon, which was written in 1650, moon people use A concern of metal something like one of our watches, full of curious little springs and minute machinery. It was really a book, but a wonderful book that has no leaves or letters: a book for the understanding which only the ears are necessary (Gladysz 15). In 1889, Edward Bellamy foresaw lengthy phonographic books that could be read "with the eyes shut... through a sort of two-pronged fork with the tines spread in the similitude of a chicken's wishbone"(336-337). And in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1951), one finds: You could see Mr. K himself in his room, reading from a metal book with wised hieroglyphs over which he brushed his hand as one might play a harp. And from the book, as his fingers stroked, a voice sang, a soft ancient voice, which told tales of when the sea was red steam on the shore and ancient men had carried clouds of metal insects and electric spiders into battle"(12). The dream has become prosaic reality--we are now in the midst of a burgeoning cultural/artistic phenomenon. According to the Audio Publishers Association, 12% of American households listened to audio books in 1994, and the industry's sales have skyrocketed by over 50% since 1993. Over 50,000 titles are now available. Audio book publishing now comprises over a multi-billion dollar industry, showing growth levels and profit mains exceeding those of printed books. Nonetheless, most of the information on audio books thus far must be ferreted out of trade journals and the popular press. The commentary I have found primarily focuses on comparing the format (often unfavorably) with the experience of reading printed books. To many, listening to audio books is a debased or lazy way to read, with connotations of illiteracy (only pre-literate children listen to stories); passivity (real reading entails self-construction of the narrative voice); abandonment of control (real reading involves pausing, skimming and savoring); and lack of commitment (real readers sacrifice other activities for their books).(1) These underlying prejudices are reinforced by the format's association with such "lowbrow" offerings as business advice and self-help titles, as well as radical abridgments of revered novels. Audio books are both dismissed as a negligible fad, and feared as another potent threat to traditional literacy.(2) I would like to change the terms of the discussion. Although, undeniably, these books are tightly linked with literary culture, restricting the discussion to this linkage neglects audio's connections with other technological entertainment media. Even though film, video and television may initially seem irrelevant to the audio phenomenon, I believe that--notwithstanding their literary sources--audio books can only be fully understood in terms of their interrelationships with contemporary visual culture. Accordingly, I offer first a brief survey of the format's history, which will begin to demonstrate the interrelationships; these connections will become more explicit when I lean upon film studies methodology to analyze audio books in terms of their production, distribution, and exhibition.(3) Historical Survey: Audio books have three direct antecedents, each contributing different components that both prefigured the format and shape it today. The first--and most obvious--is the tradition of reading books aloud. This tradition is a larger part of our cultural heritage than one might initially realize. Reading aloud was taken for granted in ancient Greece and Rome, and of course, reading aloud from the Bible and other religious texts has been a central component of religious services for millennia. …