Hey folks, it's Mac. I just want to jump in real quick with a word about the ongoing tragedy in Israel, Gaza, and the occupied territories. I've been reluctant to address this because frankly... I don't think the world needs my take on this situation. But on the other hand, the show does have listeners in the region, as well as Arab, Israeli, Jewish, and Muslim listeners in other parts of the world.
And I just wouldn't feel right just putting on this show as usual without acknowledging the tremendous suffering that's taking place right now. So I just want to say my thoughts are with all of you. at this time. And I hope that love and wisdom and peace prevail. This is Phantom power. Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power. I'm Mac Haygood. Today we do the first in what will be a short series on the audiobook. I'm a huge audiobook listener. I really got into audiobooks maybe 10 years ago.
when I started working at Miami University. I had done that rough slog through my master's and my PhD, and I realized that it had been maybe six or seven years since I'd had any time to do any real fiction reading. And I felt that this aspect of myself was just kind of starting to atrophy.
starting to feel sort of two dimensional. And yet I sort of had to still keep the pedal to the metal publishing things to get tenure, had to write that first book. And so this wasn't really the time to sort of sit back and start. reading novels again, especially when my wife and I had two young kids. So audiobooks to the rescue. My wife, Bridget, and I share an Audible account.
And we each also have a Libby account that allows us to download books through our public library. And we just listen to a ton of stuff, mostly fiction. Once I got tenure and I was able to resume something resembling a normal life. I even started reading more books on paper again. And we have a fantastic bookstore in my neighborhood. I'm a huge fan of. Shout out to Greg at Downbound Books. Just one of the best.
curated small bookstores I've ever seen. But still, I listen to audiobooks as much, if not more, than I ever have. So I wanted to do some Phantom Power episodes on the audiobook. What's its history? What are its affordances? What are its implications? How do you go about making an audiobook? So in future episodes, I'm going to talk to the amazing music writer and public educator, Warren Zanes.
about his books on Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty, and the process of narrating his own audiobooks, one of which, the Springsteen book, was just nominated for a Grammy. I'm also going to... Well, I hope I'm going to interview my favorite audiobook narrator of all time. I don't want to jinx it by saying her name yet, but fingers crossed she's going to agree to come on Phantom Power.
But first, I want to open this mini-series on audiobooks by getting into the history and theory of the medium. And I'm going to do that with Dr. Matthew Rubery. Matt is a Harvard PhD and professor of modern literature at Queen Mary University of London. He's also one of the first, if not the first, literature scholars to examine the audiobook, its history, and its affordances.
Among his other works, Dr. Rubery is the author of 2016's The Untold Story of the Talking Book from Harvard University Press. and he's the editor of Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies from Routledge in 2011. His latest book is titled Reader's Block, A History of Reading Differences, out on Stanford University Press. In this fascinating conversation, we discuss the long history of recorded literature, the weird shame around audiobook reading and its cultural roots.
the interplay between disability, neurodivergence, and alternate forms of reading, and what an audiobook criticism might look like. And for our patrons, we'll have our What's Good segment at the end of the show. where Matt will tell us something good to read, something good to listen to, and something good to do. You can become a patron of the show at patreon.com phantom power.
Matthew welcome to the show hey thanks for having me I thought maybe we could begin by just having you tell us a little bit about yourself and maybe your background Sure. I like to describe myself as an audiobook historian. I'm really in an English department, but I do a lot of...
work looking at old audiobooks. That's a much snazzier title. And I teach at a university in London called Queen Mary University of London. And then my background is I grew up in Texas. I grew up in Dallas there where you have to drive probably... eight hours any direction just to get out of the state. So you spend a lot of time driving and you can see where my interest in audio books began. That's the connection then with, with.
Being a literature scholar but already having had this love of audiobooks, is that how you kind of got into this topic? Well, the two didn't really come together for me though because audiobooks wasn't something I sort of associated with my literary work until much later on. So yes, I've been listening to audiobooks quite casually for a lot of my life. And those are the days where, speaking of long drives, you would...
encounter audiobooks at truck stops and places like that. So they were something associated with truck stops rather than libraries or sort of high culture and stuff. So bookstores might have had a... a little shelf tucked in the back that had some tape cassettes or something like that. But they were pretty off most people's radar still. And it wasn't until I'd sort of been in an academic career for some time and then made the connection of, oh.
There's this whole world of sonic recordings of books that no one ever seems to talk about. Why is that? Yeah. And I really appreciate how you sort of make an argument for the audio book as a medium of reading. And then you also give us the long history of that medium. One thing that I appreciated was that you pointed out that Edison predicted the use of the phonograph as an audiobook, right? Yeah.
when i started poking around audiobooks wanting to learn more about them i mean i thought they were a decade or two old um so they had a much deeper longer history than i realized so it just seemed like Every time I found another recording you could still go further back and basically if you do that you end up going all the way back to the invention of sound recording.
when Edison made the first recording. So yeah, he started, he tested out his machine with a nursery rhyme, Mary Had a Little Lamb. So depending on how much of a stickler you want to be about how to define an audio book, I mean, the very first sound recordings were literary. sense. I mean, at least they rhymed. And he definitely thought of this medium as more of a voice capturing mechanism, some kind of mechanical stenographer rather than a musical medium in the beginning, right?
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I mean, the future of the audiobook is all there in Edison's writings already. I mean, so even though, I mean, those early recording technologies were pretty basic. I mean, you could only record a couple of minutes at a time for the first. few decades. So you could record, let's say, poetry being read aloud. So Alfred Tennyson reads The Charge of the Light Brigade in 1890. It's a very short poem that will fit on the disc.
But you couldn't record an entire audiobook until 30 or 40 years later. But that doesn't stop Edison from sort of predicting that one day we are going to be listening to full length. novels being recorded on his disc. So he did sort of boast at the time that you could listen to an entire Dickens novel. That's totally ludicrous because you would have had to have a hundred plus whack cylinders or discs to do that. But he's right that eventually we would.
be using the technology for that purpose. Yeah. And one of the things that you mentioned in the introduction is that until 2010, audiobooks outsold e-books. So even when we think of electronic books... We still don't think about audio books, really. Although I think now maybe the world is sort of catching up to audio books and to, you know, your scholarship.
Because I feel like there's a lot more talk about them than there used to be. I believe they're the fastest growing, maybe the only growing format in publishing right now. So I think you're absolutely right. That was a dramatic change, though. I mean, from the time when I began working on this project, so let's say roughly 10 years or so to the time the book came out, I noticed a sea change in attitudes towards audiobooks.
having an interest and why don't people in English departments talk about audiobooks and my research was kind of motivated by that curious nature of what I call audiobook shame that people who read audiobooks often are kind of reluctant to talk about it. And that's unusual for reading because most people are sort of proud.
to be readers and to want to talk about the books they've read. They want to put their books on their shelf and sort of show them off. I mean, that's a good thing, I believe. But audiobook readers usually apologize when they... tell you that they read something. I do remember talking to a friend of my family, so a very non-academic friend of my family. My dad was a builder, so it was from sort of his group.
This friend knew that, you know, I was a literature professor. So he was very excited to tell me he'd read a book once. And I was equally excited to hear that he'd read one. But then he backtracked and said, well, actually, I didn't read it. I listened to it. And that really did get me thinking about people's.
complex attitudes towards these books. Because again, I mean, from my point of view, I was just thrilled that he'd encountered culture in any form. So why the qualification? Why not just boast about it? but then when i started doing my research project i went through my own sort of audiobook shame phase and that it was very difficult to
get colleagues to sort of support my grant applications to do research on the topic. People sort of raise an eyebrow at me when I started talking about my topic and make sort of... jibes, implying that this wasn't a serious academic topic. And, you know, I did think about abandoning the project. I thought, oh, these people know better than I do. But 10 years later, It seemed like everybody was listening to audiobooks and those same colleagues who had been very suspicious of the format.
They are now listening to audiobooks themselves on their phones. So that was a massive change in a very short amount of time. So even though the audiobook has this long history, I think it's only in the last decade or so that it's really become a mainstream form of entertainment. Like you said, e-books seem to...
get all the attention for a short period of time, but audiobooks seem to have displaced them, at least in terms of the national consciousness. Yeah, I've just recently been in a situation where I'm... trying to write a trade press book and I've been talking to some literary agents and they've talked to me about how it used to be that the audio rights were sort of a separate thing and that you could negotiate.
With a publisher, whether or not they were going to get the audio rights, because in my case, I was because I'm talking about sound. I had some ideas about maybe a podcast or an enhanced audio book, either alongside or in. in place of an actual, you know, readable book. And, and they were saying at this point, the audio books are so important to the industry that you can't separate that out any longer. Like they want to have those rights. What I noticed just again in that sort of...
decade-long shift in attitudes that I used to ask the authors that I knew who read their audiobooks. And often they wouldn't know. I mean, they just had never paid attention. Like, oh, I never thought to ask. That is so different now. Like you say, I mean, those rights are quite lucrative, but also, I mean, the authors want to be involved in that process.
They either want to read the books themselves or they want to have some say in who is reading it for them. They might want a celebrity to do it. So it went from sort of this sort of obscure thing to something that everyone's interested in.
One of the big sort of, I think, landmark moments in audiobooks history is it was the mid-1980s when the major publishers started publishing books in that format. It had been very sort of small, wildcat operations until then. But authors like John Updike and Toni Morrison.
record their books. And Toni Morrison's probably one of the only authors I can think of who, you know, has that sort of literary cachet, but also, I think, read every single one of her audiobooks made to record herself. That's very rare. There's very few sort of major... authors before the 21st century that read their own book or even paid much attention to who was reading their audiobook. And just a really stellar narrator of her own work, right?
Yeah, yeah. I did get a chance to interview her once about this because she was such an exception. She also has, there are recordings of her books made by professional learners as well. And she was quick to say, I mean, she really admires these voice actors who read her books. She thinks they're excellent. But she said it wasn't the voice she heard in her head. so she wanted to make her own recordings too and they are very different i mean it's a good sort of
contrast in different styles. So I do find the voice actors are much easier to listen to and that they're just very skilled at differentiating voices and knowing where to put the emphasis that helps the reader follow along and not get lost. Toni Morrison, though, reads them in a much more bookish way where she reads most of the voices in the same way. So you have to really be paying close attention because you're not going to get those oral cues. Yeah. Well, maybe that's a good...
place for us to kind of delve in for a moment into the differences between reading from a page as a reader and listening to an audio book. Where would you... go to sort of make that distinction? What are you drawn to when we're thinking about those differences? So often this sort of discussion goes right to the distinction between
Is listening to an audiobook the same as reading a printed book? And that's kind of the old debate. Should we count audiobooks as real reading, real in quotation marks? So I think that's the wrong debate to have. I mean, for me, it's an emphatic yes. What I think is much more interesting is how is the experience of reading different if you're listening to it or reading in print. So even though I think both forms of contact with the book are forms of reading.
They're, of course, very different, as it would be no matter what format you read. I think that's going to influence your reception of the text. So those are much more interesting questions from my point of view. The narrator, of course, is going to have a major influence on... your experience of a book so there's the old adage that you know a good narrator can really make a bad book and vice versa you know a book you love if it's read by a bad narrator it's going to ruin it the best sort of
Comical example I can think of of that latter case is the comedian Gilbert Gottfried who has this really nasal voice. He does a sort of spoof video available on YouTube. of reading Fifty Shades of Grey, sort of an erotic thriller novel. So, I mean, no matter how into that book you might be, you're not going to be able to listen to it read in that voice. So that's an extreme case. Usually it's much more subtle.
But I think we need to think about how the sound of the written word being read aloud, being performed, how that can influence your experience. And even though I'm both a reader of print and a listener, I've read and listened to a lot of the same books. It's always, I notice very different things depending on the medium. So I might sort of notice certain... sonic patterns in a reading that I wouldn't notice otherwise. My attention will be drawn to different aspects of the page.
things that are pretty easy to read on the page, like an epigraph, you know, quotation at the start of a chapter. Those are very confusing when you hear them read aloud. So there is a lot going on. And I do find some genres work much better when you listen to them than when you...
try to read them or vice versa. So there's one conventional take on audiobooks is that sort of plot-driven errors are very good or... narratives with a strong personal voice first-person narratives or narratives where let's say celebrity memoir something like that where you're sort of hearing the author's voice in your head already.
So I think the one thing we kind of lose when we listen to a book is a sense of spatial form, how the words kind of are laid out on the page. There aren't that many narratives where there is a big deal. I mean, we could think of... certain eras, like literary modernism, if you are very into experimental forms of literature, you might lose more than you gain by going over to Sonic Columnus. But, I mean, for most readers, most of the time, most books are going to...
translate equally well. And you'll just pay attention to different aspects of them than you would if you're reading them in another format. Dear old work platform, it's not you. It's us. Actually, it is you. Endless onboarding? Constant IT bottlenecks? We've had enough. We need a platform that just gets us. And to be honest, we've met someone new. They're called Monday.com, and it was love at first onboarding.
They're beautiful dashboards. They're customizable workflows that is floating on a digital cloud nine. So no hard feelings, but we're moving on. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.
Sometimes it can be tedious if you're listening to an audio book and the author is doing something where there's sort of like a lot of found text or people are communicating through different media, like say an epistolary novel and there's like... the dates on every letter and and it's just sort of like things that you you might just skim over with your eye very quickly to get the sense of like you know this okay this is a letter and then you would dive into the text itself
And the person sort of rather tediously has to read out like the entire, say, address at the top of the letter every time there's a letter written or what have you, right? Like those kinds of things can really sort of. be a drag. Absolutely. And one of the knocks on audiobooks is that they're often taken to be a form of secondary reading where you are not giving them your full attention. You're exercising or doing the laundry, something like that, while you listen to them.
So whereas with a book, it's getting 100% of your attention in most cases. So you can have that casual reading where you're kind of dipping in and out with your attention. But my experience of listening to audiobooks is that... they're hard work. I mean, you have to, I had to really retrain my attention span, my mind to pay attention and to not sort of mind wander or zone out. So I have talked to people who sort of
make the opposite case of what I was expecting. They say they pay much closer attention to words when they listen to audiobooks precisely because they can't sort of start skimming or going ahead. the narrator's pace is just steady and constant throughout. So things that they might kind of gloss over, suddenly they're paying equal attention to those bits as kind of the crucial sentences or the quotes that everyone highlights. So I kind of like that.
sense of enforced democratizing of your attention where you can't sort of zero in on the parts you like. Yeah. And as you well know, because your research has subsequently moved in this direction, there are a lot of kinds of learning. differences and reading differences. And some people just take in information with greater capacity through the ear rather than through the eye and vice versa. And I have sometimes noticed that
The very people who will sort of make fun of the audio book as being somehow lesser than, if you really push them, will admit that they can't concentrate on listening to an audio book. It's just too difficult for them to train their attention on. something auditory in that way for a long period of time.
That's exactly my experience, that there's that contradiction, that audiobooks are perceived as a cheat or a shortcut, not as being sufficiently hard work to get the credit that supposedly real reading deserves. But at the same time, people often say, oh, yeah, I just...
I can't pay attention when I listen to them. So you can tell something more is going on there, right? But you touched on the idea that some people get a lot more out of audiobooks than they do out of print. A lot of my recent work has been on neurodiversity. And so I've spoken to a lot of dyslexic readers in particular who...
For them, listening to a book is a much easier way of engaging with a text, and they get a lot more out of it than they do in print. So that seems like something I think a lot of us who teach undergraduates are encountering in the classroom is... a greater sense of awareness of these different learning styles and that some students, yeah, different media are going to work much better for them. Yeah, my son is one of those people. He's an avid reader, but he is...
And he listens to a ton of audio books. And then it's very interesting, though. He likes to own the printed. book as well. Like after he's listened to an audio book, he kind of wants to have that tangible thing that he can go back and refer to. I'd love to hear that. Good. In my sense is we talked about the change in attitudes towards audio books in general.
When I first started giving presentations on my research on audiobook history, it was often a room full of skeptics. And so at the end of my talk, every hand of the room would go up and we'd end up debating. are audiobooks real reading? But by the time the book came out and I was talking to audiobooks a few years after those initial presentations, the guests, often young students, they just couldn't even believe that people had once
not taking audiobook seriously. So I'm hoping your son will not face that sort of stigma that audiobook users used to encounter. And I don't see it as much anymore. And when I do, it's often, it seems a generational divide. Yeah, I have to admit, I mean, I'm old enough that I still feel the stigma. I was at a dinner party this weekend and I was with a bunch of humanists from my university.
Some of them I think were, you know, Renaissance and medieval scholars. And I had recently been listening to A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tushman, which is like this. enormous study of the middle ages. And, and I was still just talking about some anecdotes and just said I had read the book and I didn't say that I had listened to the book in part because it just doesn't seem germane to me right like it like it's just like
There's no big difference as far as I'm concerned. But then my wife somehow mentioned that I had been listening to this book. And then I felt like outed, like, yeah, like the shame, like, especially in front of like my friends from the, you know, English department and whatnot. Like, I was just like, you need to start hanging out with your, with your son's friends then. Cause there won't be any of that shame.
I absolutely still do encounter that. And the main place I encounter is, sort of like you said, is colleagues from the English department. It's the place I would expect to be more open-minded. I do think that impulse is coming from a good place, that people...
are heavily invested in books and their identities as readers. And I think they want to preserve that sort of special status of books and protect it from sort of the... encroachment of all these other media so i mean we just always see the boundaries of books like most media sort of collapsing as they turn into film and tv adaptations or videos or tick tocks or whatever people want to sort of keep protect the book from that i think it's misguided though
Because as you say, a lot of people I know who listen to books are passionate readers. Most of the early audiobook publishers, I interviewed a lot of them when I was doing this research, it never occurred to them. that there might be sort of this disdain for audiobooks. I mean, they saw themselves as just book lovers making books accessible to people.
finding ways for people to read more than they would be able to if they didn't have books to listen to while they were stuck in traffic or something like that. And I find also that just sort of bringing up that topic of disability really... changes the tenor of the conversation.
Because if someone's listening to a book, I mean, let's say you in your case, a lot of people will criticize audiobook listeners because they think they're making a choice, the easy choice, and they're trying to get out of work and get all the gratification of high culture without kind of putting in the effort. So there's that.
well-known, the Irish novelist Colm Toybin has that amusing quote where he says the difference between reading a book in print and listening to a book is like running a marathon and watching a marathon on TV. I think that's such a revealing analogy though too because A marathon is hard work where it's a huge amount of effort and pain to achieve that goal.
And a lot of people think of reading like that, that it should be sort of painful and stuff. And you should have to sort of slog your way through, I don't know, 400 pages of James Joyce to earn your distinction as a reader rather than just think about it. Hey, is there a way we could make this more pleasurable?
What would be a way to make a medieval history fit into my life and something that would be enjoyable at the same time? So there is that kind of anxiety there. Whereas with disability, I find particularly, I've got a lot of blind friends through having done this research and interviewed people.
over the years who are not making that choice. I think people are a lot less comfortable of accusing blind readers of either being illiterate because they can't read print and can only listen to it, or of wanting to cheat or take shortcuts.
And I mean, conversations with blind readers who listen to audiobooks is humbling because, wow, do they have, in many cases, just an incredible recall for the text they've read. So often that is not a sort of casual or secondary listening at all. They are paying close attention. attention. In many cases it seems closer than my friends who are reading print in a quite distracted way.
I mean, the first scholar who really got me thinking about blind readers was a past guest on this show, Mara Mills, who, you know, I just remember one of the things that she pulled out for me, which. Which again, yeah, very humbling is the... crazy speeds that blind readers can listen at and still like parse all the information. They want to be able to read things quickly. Right. And so the aesthetics of the narration.
aren't always first and foremost for them. And it's more like a way of conveying the information into their mind for them to do what they will with, which is really fascinating to think about. Yeah, and Mara Mills is an incredible media historian. We hosted a conference together early in the writing of this book because she was probably the only person I spoke to who knew anything about the history of audiobooks. So, I mean, meeting her was a real high point of the...
my research on this topic. Yeah. Yeah. So I had made a blunder and I wrote an early book on, it was an edited essay collection. on audiobooks. And I made a blunder in that where I said something like there is no speed listening equivalent to speed reading. And of course, that's absolutely wrong. I mean, the more people I talk to, the more I realize that how many people actually did listen at incredibly fast speaking rates.
And now I am one of those people myself. I mean, I cannot listen to things at the normal rate. It's almost always double speed for me. Certainly podcasts, which tend to be sort of informational anyway, but even some books, even though I kind of want to prolong the aesthetic experience. of a great novel, I don't necessarily want to speed that up. But sometimes just even giving it a little boost really does help my mind pay better attention. I'm more likely to mind wander.
the pace of narration isn't just kind of perfectly calibrated to my mental rhythms. That's fascinating. One of the things that I think disturbs folks about... audio book listening to kind of go back to this old controversy is the narrator is making a set of choices. They're embedding a bunch of choices into the experience of consuming the novel, right? And sometimes I hear a line reading by a narrator and I'm like, no, you're saying that wrong. Like I just hear it.
Immediately, like you're emphasizing the wrong word there. You're missing the irony. Are you really paying attention to what you're narrating? And so this maybe brings us to this idea of what is a literary criticism? of narration or what is an audio book literary criticism? Because I think that's one of the goals that you had when you initially wrote that book is to start thinking in that way for literature scholars.
I love the question about what is an audio literary criticism. And I should just preface that by saying that is a key difference that you've raised, what's often called vocalization, that if you're reading something silently in print,
you are imagining the sound of those words or the sound of the character speaking in your head versus the narrator doing it for you. So there is something to that in terms of being... quite crucial to the reading experience but i also like the way you know you mentioned that you know you're not sort of
a totally passive reader either. You're pushing back on certain ways of expressing the sentence by saying, no, you're saying that wrong. And I think that's what's often left out here is that the fact that I'm thinking about alternative ways of a line could be said. while I'm listening suggests to me that there still is a similar process going on in my head while I'm listening to a book. A kind of agency for the reader. Yeah, which usually I think we end up with a very stark contrast between.
an active print reader and then a passive audiobook reader, whereas I see much more overlap between the two. Or, again, just to bring in blind readers as a context, I do know a lot of blind readers who prefer to listen to what we'd call AI voices today, which is sort of like computer-generated voices. And this is back when, you know, they had a sort of Stephen Hawking quality to them, where they were very, they did not sound human by any measure.
But they preferred voices like that because it enabled them to have much more sort of latitude in their imaginations for interpreting the work. Because the works were not being pronounced correctly, they were constantly sort of, again... calibrating the senses in their minds. So there are ways of still getting that if you want that.
I know very few sighted readers who do that, which suggests to me that they don't necessarily want that much latitude. They want some sort of middle ground there. In terms of that question about the audio literary criticism, I think there are just very few examples. of that right now. I would love to see more. There are, say, magazines like Audiophile Magazine, a trade magazine that reviews audiobooks. They're very short.
But they do prioritize talking about the narrative's voice, for instance, and how the voice sort of relates to the content. So I think that is one place to start. We all know from the history of working with previous media adaptations, let's say the obvious case of film adaptation, the best reviews do not just sort of march through the two forms of media. comparing let's say the novel and the film and just noting how accurate the film is
So the key is to sort of treat the film adaptation as a work of art in its own right. And then that's going to be much more satisfying, right? And maybe some attention to the novel and often in the sense of how does the cinematic adaptation... convert things that work on print and you know kind of adapt them so they work on the screen things like that that's when it works best and that's my hunch about audiobooks
is that you don't just want to sort of compare the literary recording to the print original you just want to talk about the aesthetic experience of having that work read aloud to you perhaps out hearing it particularly mellifluous passages that stood out to you or patterns of imagery that you may not have noticed otherwise. That would be where I'd want us to go. Or my dream would be comparing multiple...
Sonic editions of a text. A lot of our classics have been read by multiple narrators. So I'm thinking something like Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I think that's probably been read. 20 times at least so you could sort of make some comparisons and see well what makes a good recording why is one better than the other or what does one narrator do that makes them
easier to listen to than others, things like that. So some type of comparative criticism would be very exciting for me as well. Some audiobooks are like an event and there are some recordings that I think are better than the print original. That would be... where i would want us to have let's say a review that focused on the recording rather than the print original versus just some book you know books used to come out as print and then six months later the audio recording would come out usually
They drop on the same day now. I mean, as you said, it's big business these days. But still, some of these recordings are media events. They might have particularly celebrated reader, for instance. And that's where I say we could sort of either do both or... prioritize the audio recording. Have you done much in terms of studies of reception?
of audiobooks, especially around like, I guess I'm sort of thinking about the sort of parasocial relationship that a listener might get to a particular narrator. Are there particular narrators who are like... total rock stars at this point that people are fans of? Is there a sort of, yeah, is there a sort of fandom around audiobook narrators? Huge fandom. So in some ways, the fandom...
It kind of undercuts what I said about being able to sort of listen to books critically and not... be swept along by the narrator's voice but then the popularity of celebrity recordings sort of undoes that because people are obviously listening to hear that voice although perhaps not that different from cinema where you can go to a film because i don't know you want to see Tom Cruise, but you are also kind of forgetting that it's Tom Cruise.
because it's a character at the same time. So both those things can be true at the same time. Absolutely. But you're absolutely right. They're rock star narrators. A lot of the research I did for this project on the history of audiobooks was archival. And I would go back and find... letters, pretty much fan mail, written to early narrators describing how much they like their voice and stuff. And there are cases, for instance, blind readers, I think this is very vivid.
The reaction, the strong reaction, the strong feelings that people had for narrators was very vivid just because they listened to so many audiobooks, often for most of their childhood, through their adult days. So they developed, you know, long... relationships, where they might hear 30 or 40 books read binary rather than just two or three. And I do I interviewed a blind person who
told me that she had burst into tears when she met a narrator named Mitzi Friedlander because she'd been listening to her voice her entire childhood. So to meet this woman in person was the greatest sort of celebrity encounter that she could think of. I find the thing that this is true though of contemporary readers as well is that
A lot of readers start by choosing audiobook titles just based on what you want to read. But once you find a narrative you like, you often just start listening to other books they have read. So just to give you my own personal example. There is a British actress named Juliet Stevenson. She's a phenomenal reader. She's in films as well, but it's as a voice actor that she really...
has captured my attention. And she does a lot of 19th century novels in particular. So the novel Jane Eyre, but also Jane Austen novels. I think all of those readings that she does just transform my understanding of books that i've often read you know at least four or five times in print and then to hear her read them it's almost like i have no skills as a reader and i'm just in the presence of someone who reads much better in person than than
than my brain voice, than the voice I'm hearing in my head. So it's very humbling to listen to a true professional. Just to double down on that point, that was actually a revelation for me when I read that in your book. You had a quote where you said, the strong imperative to read for oneself implies that the best reading is one's own reading. But yeah, that totally...
Isn't the case, right? Like some people read better than your brain voice, or at least some people are better positioned to read particular texts better than your brain. which has had its own set of experiences and background, is able to narrate. Well, in literature, a real exception among the arts in that sense is that, you know, we don't read film scripts and imagine the action in our head. We go watch the film performed by expert actors. And, you know, same with musical scores.
You can do that, but most people will prefer to sit and hear expert musicians perform the music much better than you can in your head. Whereas literature is an exception where we insist on sort of the amateur performance that we can do. or that we should do it for ourselves. I mean Edison was predicting again at the very dawn of sound recording
that people would use audiobooks basically to listen to trained elocutionists or professional readers who could read better than the average reader. And obviously, we have strong attitudes against that. That does sound like a pretty good idea worth discussing. Why not let someone read these books who are going to do it better than you can? And listening to professionals is humbling for that reason too because it made me realize the inadequacy of a lot of my own reading.
Everything from mispronunciations to misunderstandings. The accents I do in my head are, I think, sort of embarrassing in terms of how basic they are compared to, if you listen to something like a book read by its author, something like... Angela's Ashes where the author is basically talking about his Irish upbringing.
But it is his Irish brogue that really makes it. So it just enhances the reading experience so much more than I think reading your head. And I'm sure he captures that to an extent on the page. But my guess is... most readers who are not Irish are going to have an impoverished accent being heard in their head. So yeah, I say bring on the prose. You know, it also makes me think, you know, I'm... I'm a media scholar. And one of the things that we learn about in media history is sort of like.
this construction of radio drama as being a theater of the mind, right? And so this is a very similar medium. And in fact, it's a medium that gives you more because there's sound effects and whatnot. And yet this medium was kind of... lavished with praise for peaking the imagination and allowing the listener to construct these scenarios in their head. Whereas here we have an audio book that actually gives you less and somehow because it's being compared.
to a different medium. It's like supposedly an impoverished version where you don't have an active role at all. Yeah, and I think that's one of the big shifts we're seeing now as well, that as long as the audiobook was compared to the printed book, it's always going to be second rate, right? And for most of its history, there has been sort of that anxiousness to make sure.
the audiobook has some legitimacy by trying to imitate the printed book as closely as possible. So if you do see album covers or anything from early books they're often like a picture of the printed book or they are reading you know all the kind of the what we call paratext the the boring information of books just so you kind of capture that sense of
this being equivalent to reading a printed book. But I think in the last decade or so, we've got a lot more experimentation going on with audio publishers.
who don't have that hang up about needing to be seen as the equivalent to the printed book. And, you know, there's a real renaissance in radio drama, largely facilitated through podcasts these days. But I think a lot of... book recordings now are moving in that direction and trying to experiment with with figuring out what can an audiobook do that a printed book can't so how can we sort of it you sound
or sound effects to enhance the reading experience. So I think we'll see a lot more bleeding in of audiobooks with other media in good ways. I mean, a lot of publishers are already making their books much more cinematic, or they're kind of experimenting with podcasts where you... You kind of have an official reading, but it'll be mixed with sort of author commentary, recordings, Q&As, things like that, supplementary information that you wouldn't necessarily find in an audio recording.
I find that really exciting and sort of looking forward to seeing where this goes. But that would not have been possible a couple decades ago because people would have just been too anxious about not being seen in relation to the book. Yeah. So this question, maybe like a sub-question of your research about what is reading, this question that was raised by the audio book, seems to have led you into this fascinating terrain of...
reading differences and neurodiversity. Can you talk a bit about your current work and then maybe tell us a little bit about what's coming next for you? Sure. My last book was basically a history of neurodiversity. and reading practice. So how people with various cognitive conditions that influence the way they read, what they've said about how their experience differs from your average neurotypical reader. So I'm thinking here of everything from dyslexia, which is probably the best
known of these conditions to other conditions like synesthesia, where you might read printed words in black and white on the page, but you will see them in color or experience sensations of flavor or taste in your mouth while you're reading. printed words or I spoke to a lot of autistic readers who had a very different relationship with a printed word where often they would
kind of fixate on the appearance of different typefaces or the texture of letters, the feel of ink on the printed page. And they could decode words and they could sort of read them aloud. but often without understanding them because they were sort of paying attention to different dimensions. So I was thinking about these audiobook debates about what counts as real reading, and obviously I spent a lot of time defending.
listening to books as real reading especially in relation to physical disabilities like blindness this was a chance to sort of branch out and say well what other forms of reading don't we really give much attention to or take seriously. So, I mean, the case I'm trying to make is that we should have a much more inclusive understanding of reading that rather than trying to police the boundaries of what counts as real reading and kind of push people out.
We should find ways of kind of seeing what we have in common with what people are doing when they're doing something that looks kind of like reading, but maybe not reading as we normally encounter it. Just to give some examples, there was a... A man named Kim Peek a couple of decades ago, he was the basis for the film Rain Man with Tom Cruise again and Dustin Hoffman. So a big hit Hollywood film. He was a fascinating reader in that he would read a book.
He would read the left page of a book with his left eye, and he would read the right page of a book with his right eye simultaneously. And he could sort of speed read, and then he had more or less a photographic memory, so he could remember. Whatever he read as well. So he would read a Tom Clancy novel like The Hunt for Red October, which I think is around 900 pages in your average paperback. I think you'd read it in just over an hour.
More or less remember every word of it. So there's an example of neurodiversity as a real strength. Or some of your listeners might know Temple Grandin as well. He's one of the most famous.
spokespeople for autism out there. And she has more or less a photographic memory too, but she would often read books, but it wasn't reading in the sense that we think of that term. She would basically just sort of... take a almost a snapshot a photographic image of the page and store it in her memory and then when she needed that information she would go and retrieve it so it was it was kind of reading
and that she had the pages in her head, but she wouldn't often know what was in that information until you asked her a question about it. So those are just some examples that come to mind of different ways of reading that don't normally... come into our conversations about reading. And I find these examples usually help people reflect on their own reading practices and aspects of your reading that might be kind of quirky or unusual that you...
kind of just have set aside in order to talk to other readers like you read like they do as well. So it did certainly work on this book really gave me a better sense of all the different ways of reading that are out there and also my own ways of reading, ways in which I read like everyone else, but other ways in which I seem to be a pretty singular reader. That's reminding me of this book that just came out in August called Fearfully and Wonderfully Made.
The Astonishing New Science of the Senses. It's by this author, Maureen Seberg. She's a thinnest seat, isn't she? Yeah. And the book is about... The amazing capacity our senses have, like for example, she talks about this study that showed that humans can perceive a single photon. With the visual cortex, it's like there are apparently like, you know, these ways that we are, we can engage with.
the world through our senses down to like the molecular level or even the photon level, this sort of quantum level. But it doesn't make its way all the way up the chain to our consciousness, obviously, but that these potentials are there, these kinds of ways that we're affected by the world around us are there. And so it would completely make sense that if we have these capacities, that there would be a diversity of experiences, you know, in terms of the way people engage their own senses.
Yeah, I like that word potentials too. I mean, so throughout that book, I use the phrase reading differences instead of reading disabilities because reading disabilities sort of tends to focus on the negative aspects of reading in alternative ways.
Whereas reading differences draws attention to the strengths as well, the advantages, like you're saying, or what we might call potentials. Yeah, yeah, amazing. Well, this has just been a fascinating conversation, and I just want to thank you for joining us. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Matt. And that's it for this episode of Phantom Power. Huge thanks to Matthew Rubery. Today I had production assistance from Caitlin Phan, and today's music is by Graham Gibson.
Take care, and we'll see you in a couple of weeks.