On E-books and Audiobooks

I have this shameful secret, a secret that, even now, pangs me to speak of. It is a reminder that, though I now consider myself a much more woke individual, I wasn’t always so. As a younger man, I was guilty of ignorance, pettiness, and, yes, even prejudice. In my defense, maybe it was how I was raised--just another piss-poor, backwoods Southern boy, brought up in some hick town in North Carolina. I grew up knowing beyond a doubt that my family was white trash. In my early twenties, I finally escaped my home town and went to college. It was there that I met my wife, and it was there that I realized that the world was a far more vast and strange place than I could have imagined, its horizons stretching out further than any human eye could see.

So, it is from this place that, though I am ashamed, I feel that there must be a reckoning. The only way to move beyond ignorance is to address it directly and without regard for political correctness. To this end, I have chosen this forum to bring my personal biases into the light and, in doing so, forever cast them out. So, here goes: until just a few short years ago, I hated e-books and audiobooks.

It feels great to finally get this off my chest.

My hatred of e-books and audiobooks stemmed not from any real frustration with the user experience so much as from the almost religious conviction that e-books and audiobooks simply did not count as books. They were second-class books at best and, at worst, an excuse for non-readers to assume literary pretenses. Books have, by general consensus and for centuries, been characterized as printed words on paper. To me, e-books and audiobooks were a fashion, a novelty. They represented a bastardization of what I considered to be one of mankind’s greatest achievements. The obvious fallacy of this reasoning is that, by championing such a limited view of books, I was actually reducing this achievement to the trappings of a particular medium.

Human beings are driven to tell stories. The act of storytelling is as much a part of our nature as the desire to survive, to eat, to fuck. In millennia past, our ancestors gathered around the fire to ward off darkness, took comfort in their proximity to one another, and they listened close as a voice would inevitably arise in the night like smoke and say, “Let me tell you about the time...” Stories are the birthright of our species and their power lies not in the medium through which they are told, but in their capacity to captivate the imagination. The medium, therefore, is inconsequential, useful only so far its ability to transmit something greater than itself.

E-books and audiobooks are simply another medium, and they have changed the modern landscape of books for the better. To this day, I love the tactile pleasures of reading a well-bound hardback: stroking the texture of the pages, inhaling deep the scent of the spine, as alluring as sex and addictive as cocaine. But there are admittedly some ways that e-books and audiobooks may be superior to traditional print formats. As a librarian, I can appreciate the utility of e-books and audiobooks. What they may lack in tactile sensation, they make up for in convenience and customization. With e-books, readers can optimize the reading experience with the customization of fonts and colors, highlighting functionality, note-taking, and even sharing the experience with other readers via social media applications. Audiobooks allow readers to enjoy books at times when reading would be otherwise not possible. Audiobooks also provide the unique benefit of allowing readers to experience books in the tradition of oral storytelling. Like e-books, audiobooks also allow a certain degree of customization as readers can choose editions based on narrators whose voice and style appeal best to their sensibilities.

Some other benefits of e-books and audiobooks are that they may be more accessible to readers with disabilities. Perhaps the greatest strength of both e-books and audiobooks, though, is the ability for readers to transport entire libraries of books on the mobile devices. The ability to easily download digital formats can also make books can reduce environmental impact, make books more economically accessible to readers, and increase the visibility of authors that may otherwise be unable to compete with more well-known names in the print market.