![]() It was also my old next-door neighbour, a once voracious reader who was by then almost blind but could listen contentedly to old-fashioned audiobook tapes for hours, so long as someone occasionally helped her find the next cassette. But that was me when I was on maternity leave, and couldn’t seem to find 10 uninterrupted minutes to sit down with the paper, so kept Radio 4 on half the day for some semblance of adult conversation. To some, that may sound irritatingly goldfish-brained. Millennials in particular seem to be all ears Katie Vanneck-Smith, the former Wall Street Journal president and cofounder of the “slow news” website Tortoise, admitted recently that when its members (who are mostly under 39) were asked what they wanted to read, the consensus was “actually, I listen, I don’t read”. When the world seems to be falling apart it’s comforting to let someone else tell you a story, even if it is a faintly apocalyptic one, given the dominance of news and politics at the top of the Apple podcast charts. Podcasting is growing faster than any other media, with almost one in five Britons listening at least once a week now according to this summer’s Rajar survey. But the audiobook market, while still small, also notched up its seventh year of double-digit growth in the pandemic year of 2021. Lockdown rekindled the love of curling up with a good novel, to publishers’ delight, with more than a third of people claiming to be reading more to fill their days. ![]() ![]() But is that fair? If the effort involved in sitting down and decoding written words with your actual eyes were to gradually fade away in years to come – just as the old-fashioned tether of a landline phone gave way to the freedom of a mobile in your pocket, and cash yielded to the clinical efficiency of credit cards – what exactly would we have lost? ![]() Reading instinctively feels like the higher art, perhaps because bedtime stories used to be strictly for children and oral storytelling is associated with more primitive cultures in the days before the printing press. ![]()
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