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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Mint-on-sunday/  Letter from my evening walk
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Letter from my evening walk

On the joy of audiobooks and related insights

E-books? Passé. Photo: APPremium
E-books? Passé. Photo: AP

Once upon a time, there was a certain utopian progressivism to all technology journalism. The sense that most, if not all, human activity is being slowly transformed irreversibly by the optimisms and innovations of technological change. Disruptions—all pleasant, of course—were imminent. And what promises were made to us! Not just hovering cars and self-cooking food and the other fantasies of Jetsons cartoons, but the much more mundane excitements of electronic books and electronic shopping and telecommuting.

And yet here we are still commuting each morning, stuck in endless traffic jams, crawling past shops and malls and hipster notebook boutiques and what not. Even the printed book is making a comeback. The UK, it was recently reported, is going through a print renaissance, with physical book sales growing, while e-books are shipping with unprecedented sluggishness. In the US e-book revenues have dropped by 11% last year, The Wall Street Journal reported.

You would be hard-pressed to find a single news story these days that talks about e-books with any kind of optimism. Instead the fastest growing form of publishing now, the Journal reports with the great alacrity that comes with having spotted a trend first, is audiobooks.

Audiobooks?! Well, that is a bit strange. This is like baggy jeans becoming the fastest growing form of textiles. Or Sipani Dolphins becoming the fastest growing form of… fibreglass? Audiobooks have been around for decades. But nobody cared for them because they were terribly fiddly to listen to on tapes or CDs.

Indeed, I vividly remember that brief MP3 player interregnum between the CD era and the smartphone epoch when you had to rip CDs into audio files that you could then listen to with great enjoyment on the shady non-iPod device your shady uncle smuggled in from Sharjah.

And then, apparently, smartphones happened, and audiobooks are booming again.

I have always been something of spoken word aficionado, mostly thanks to a small transistor radio my father once got free with ten frozen chickens or something. I used the little device to listen to all kinds of radio comedy shows and BBC documentaries and so on. And very little music.

In fact, I’ve never been much of a radio music person. Thus, it was not surprising when I later became an early adopter of podcasts—many, many years before Serial—and then audiobooks. I enjoy them very much indeed during long walks in the evening when my work is done but before the ladies have come back home.

One of the first audiobooks I listened to was a really excellent production of Max Brooks’ World War Z. Many suspenseful hours were spent listening to it as I missed bus stops, overshot train stations, picked up other people’s children from nurseries and then secretly returned them. Since then I’ve become a committed listener. I tend to purchase around 10 audiobooks a year, around 7 of which I listen to completion immediately. The remainder I usually return for a refund or, on rare occasions, set aside for slow, thoughtful consumption.

So while I zipped through World War Z, The Martian and Robert Harris’s An Officer and a Gentleman, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s magisterial A History of Christianity will take at least another year to consume properly. It is both very long and very, very dense with information.

Often, I end up having to both listen to and read a book. For instance, when I have to review a book for Mint. I often find this an illuminating experience. Bill Bryson, it turns out, is far grumpier in audio than he is on the page. Also, audiobook versions of almost any book published before the 1920s or thereabouts tend to make for very laborious listening. (Montaigne is an exception.)

The Wall Street Journal report talks about how different types of people from various walks of life consume audiobooks. One retailer said that listeners on average spent two hours a day listening to his products. But the report forgets, I think, to ask a more basic question. If audiobooks are booming, surely this means more and more people have more and more time to do things that do not require them to be mentally present. Or, in any case, that such free time has always existed and is only being exploited by some listeners now.

Isn’t this just really quite fascinating? That so many of us have so many hours each day when we are going about doing things that require no mental presence or involvement? This could be exercise or commuting or whatever else it is. I wonder sometimes if it is a good thing to keep piping input into our heads without a break all day.

But you know what? It is better than consuming all that effluvium on social media or TV news. So if you are in the market for a trendy new way of keeping your mind occupied, why not try an audiobook or two? In fact, you don’t even have to spend any money to try them. There are lots of free audiobooks available on the web on sites such as Librivox or the Internet Archive.

Give it a shot. And then come join the audiobook fraternity. You will find your treadmill sessions less painful, your walks more pleasurable, and yourself amused. Or terrified. Or in tears. Or thrilled.

Letter From... is Mint on Sunday’s antidote to boring editor’s columns. Each week, one of our editors—Sidin Vadukut in London and Arun Janardhan in Mumbai—will send dispatches on places, people and institutions that are worth ruminating about on the weekend.

Comments are welcome at feedback@livemint.com

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Published: 30 Jul 2016, 11:16 PM IST
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