Book up, because you can be both Team Print and Team Digital Audio

The debate about whether digital audiobooks are some lesser, embarrassing cousin to print is so tiresome, exasperating and narrow. Do we really have to choose sides, and state whether we are Team Print or Team Digital Audio?

Equivalence comes up all the time. Can you say you’ve ‘read’ an audiobook? Perhaps in today’s marketing speak, you’ve instead ‘consumed’ it. I’m picturing early audiences across the centuries, sitting around a fire and ‘consuming’ The Iliad, as narrated by some passing bard. Or Icelandic Eddas. Or Native American myths. Or Dickens or Dickinson. Because in those long days and nights pre-Netflix, reading aloud at home to a small domestic audience was an actual thing that happened. Because hearing stories, in the broadest sense of the word, read out loud triggers something very human, very ancient and very rewarding.

Back in pre-millennium days when I thought I’d become an academic and was teaching composition, and occasionally even Anglo-Irish literature to Silicon Valley undergraduates, I looked for every opportunity to have them go listen to authors read their work.

Having lived in Ireland the previous few years, I’d absorbed the magic – the astonishing, everyday, accessible magic – of hearing poetry and prose read aloud. Irish audiences treasured being read to. They still do: witness the non-stop literary festivals.

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In four years of my California undergraduate literature degree, I don’t recall once, ever, going to a reading. They generally cost money, and seemed to target precious literary types that I vaguely imagined still dressed like 1950s beatniks. Readings weren’t part of the culture, just Culture. Not for the rest of us.

Then I came to Ireland as a postgraduate and oh my, the challenge was to avoid readings and writers. My first year in Ireland in the 1980s, our writer in residence, who taught a weekly class, was John Banville. The second was Derek Mahon. In those years, I heard and met so many of Ireland’s extraordinary men and women of the pen. They utterly transformed the way I saw literature, from the printed words of dead writers of centuries past, to a vocation burningly alive and passionate, a way of life, a job even, not a side hobby.

[ John Banville: ‘I’m 76 now, and I’m as baffled by the world as I was when I was five’ ]

So when I began teaching US undergrads, most of them resentfully stuck in my class (composition is mandatory for all first years), I had them attend readings, from Adrienne Rich to Seamus Heaney (who visited our campus), William Trevor (who read at Stanford) to Bharati Mukherjee (I drove her in my old Toyota from one campus reading to another).

Heaney (who happened to be my PhD dissertation topic) was extraordinary. I’d given my classes a few of his best-known poems for advance reading, but worried whether his bogs, potatoes, ploughs ands water pumps would have anything to say to my suburban and immigrant students.

I needn’t have worried. He was electric, and they were wired right into it. Poetry worked just as it should – words carried not just their surface meaning but layer upon boggy layer and reached down to grasp something shared, something true, that spanned cultures. And, importantly, there was that Heaney person and voice, filling an overflow campus auditorium, like a rock star. He’d recently won the Nobel Prize, helping to make the reading an occasion.

[ Obituary: Heaney ‘the most important Irish poet since Yeats’ ]

The next day, my normally low-key students were excited in ways I’d never seen. About poetry. About words. Spoken words! They described the thrill when Heaney (as I’d hoped) voiced the poems that they’d read silently to themselves, transforming them, drawing out nuances, weaving something new, something oral. Even the student who’d complained bitterly to me of having to ask his boss for the night off to go hear, ugh, POETRY. Earlier that week, he’d wailed out the despised word that embodied his humiliation. But he loved Heaney and his spoken words.

I’d like to think those students internalised that evening, that they want on to read to their own children because they suddenly remembered, as they hadn’t since they were small, want it means to listen, to hear, to sit in silence, to think, to let the articulated word sink slowly into the depths of consciousness, to be restored to the self, the internal person, in some special way that must awaken something primordial, that we’ve done as a species since we huddled in caves and hunted mammoths.

My San Jose students then were at the leading edge of the digital generations to come. Many grew up with the first home computers, and played early digital games. Are they audiobook-buying millennials now? Do they recall how reading could give one pleasure, but listening, deliver something fresh and valuable in its own right?

That’s how I view audiobooks. And so must many others, in a market that is growing at a over 25 per cent per year, boosted, apparently, by us being literally left to our devices during Covid. What that might mean, is a topic for another day. But for now, I’m emphatic that yes: you can, joyfully, be both Team Print and Team Digital Audio.