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Listening to an Audiobook Is Not the Same as Reading a Real One
Don’t fool yourself
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
Two days ago, Ray Bradbury would have been 100 years old. If he could comment on his observation from 1993, he’d probably conclude we’re succeeding.
In 1953, Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian vision of the world in which books are illegal and so-called “firemen” burn any that remain.
40 years later, he understood we didn’t need law and fire to destroy the written word: We just had to make sure we’re too busy to look at it.
In 1993, it was tabloids and TV. Today, it’s the internet and video games. None of these things are inherently bad. They’re just too seductive — and we’re too weak to prioritize what’s important.
However, even Bradbury couldn’t have anticipated the world’s most ingenious installment in tearing us away from turning the page. Instead of distracting us from books altogether, it now seduces us with an innocent prompt:
“If you don’t have time to read, why don’t you just listen?”
Audiobooks are the fastest-growing segment of publishing. In the US, $1.2 billion worth of them were sold in 2019, eclipsing ebooks by…
