In one of his many philosophical interviews, Steve Jobs said about new technological products (I quote from memory): “You start with one goal and end up with another. The Mac was born to automate office work and ended up changing the world of graphics and publishing”, with desktop publishing.
The study of messenger RNA to fight cancer began in some basement in America and Germany and eventually gave birth to the flu vaccine that saved the world.
Steve Bezos, who was familiar with this pattern (which I would call "slipping"), at the beginning of the last decade bought everything that moved on earth in the immaterial book technology sector. Among these acquisitions was Audible. When the ground shifted from ebooks to audiobooks, Amazon stood and Barnes & Noble went into receivership This slide pattern has fully come true in the book industry.
OK, that's fine. People have chosen… for now. It even helped a little. The ebook failed to break through the (to me senseless) hostility this project faced due to its identification with Amazon, which Jonathan Franzen It describes, in the context of an apocalyptic scenario of new media, like the Voldemort of culture. In this post I tried to explain the reasons for the failed promise of ebooks and therefore I won't go back to it, amen.
TG1
Audiobooks are not, however, a second or third choice like the one made by Zeno Cosini in the Malfenti house.
That people love to listen to books as much as read them is now well established. Even TG1, the more staid and mainstream of the news programmes, dedicated a very well done report to the audiobook boom in prime time.
He did so at the end of the show, in a space dedicated to the curious and somewhat surprising things that happen in the world. When TG1 says it, the most relaxing of the news to accompany the dinner of Italian families, it means that we are here.
So I don't intend to bore you with data, analyzes of a method of accessing content that 15 years ago was a super-niche phenomenon.
Not for me. For me, she never was.
Io
I started listening to books read with a yellow Sony walkman as early as 1982. The first audiobook I let myself read on walks was The songs by Leopardi, read by Vittorio Gassmann and then by an amazing and impossible Carmelo Bene (but Arnoldo Foà, Alberto Lupo and Giorgio Albertazzi were also very good at reading). Carmelo Bene then recorded a "crazy" edition of the Orphic songs by Dino Campana. Now you can also find them on YouTube on the initiative of the Sicilian Cinema Archive to which they should make a monument next to the Pretoria Fountain in Palermo.
Second, it came The steppe wolf by Herman Hesse on audio cassette (I can't remember the player anymore). Nice and short too! But the most beautiful listening have been I Miserabili by Victor Hugo in complete edition (60 hours of listening) read by a heroic Moro Silo, now on Audible. The commendable Moro Silo also read War and peace (73 hours of listening). Very appreciated readings those of Silo: I Miserabili received 417 5-star ratings and War and peace 153.
The problem I had 25 years ago with videotapes of works of this type was that I always had to finish a tape so as not to lose the listening point, so my day was scheduled by Wretched. Now the Audible app picks up where you left off. Great Audible!
Traveling a lot on foot, I was mesmerized by listening to the books on headphones (beware of crossroads, absolutely not recommended in London) and then I started recording the episodes of Aloud on Radio3 broadcast from Monday to Friday in the mid-afternoon (however, they were hardly complete readings). It took method and perseverance not to miss the recording of any episode. There was no podcast then! Even today (but I no longer know where exactly), I have hundreds of tapes with recordings of Aloud.
However, I managed to recover the mp3s of 240 episodes (of real screenplays) of the History in yellow, a listen that I recommend to everyone. Beautiful. Many episodes are up YouTube. My favorite is the one onAnabasis, directed by Francesco Pannofino.
I would say that today, taking stock, I have listened to audiobooks more than read books in other formats. I lacked the time to read; to listen, I also had to travel on foot or by bike and sometimes by car (but it's better to leave it alone).
Stephen King
Precisely for this experience I was not surprised when I recently read an interview by Stephen King, who is always ahead of everyone else, where he tells of having given 20 dollars to his three teenage children to let them read and record on videotape numerous novels that he listened to while walking the streets of Maine. $20 a reading, of course.
As we know, in June 1999 during one of these walks, the writer (who, like me, walks on asphalt) was invested from a van and reduced to end of life.
In the basement of Stephen King's house in Bangor there are still boxes and boxes with the tapes recorded by the children.
Economist
I want to mention two other episodes that confirm and explain the success of books read aloud.
The technology manager of "The Economist", which has published an audio version of the entire magazine since 2006, declared, by way of pitch to credit the audio listening, that a subscriber to the weekly listens to the entire content of the Economist ( about 10 hours) while swimming in the pool. How he does it is not said. The iPhone is water resistant, but AirPods, not even the Pros, were (too bad!) designed to be used in the shower or in water sports like swimming, Apple says. They'd be great in the shower (for karaoke)1 But there are third-party earphones, albeit not as cute as the already Airpods, compatible with iPhones that are waterproof.
New York Times
Journalist Pamela Paul hosts the podcast of New York Times Book Review and often hosts Alexandra Alter, book critic of the New York newspaper. One day Paul asked Alter how she manages to read all the books she talks about.
“Simple – replied Alter – I listen to them on my iPhone on my way to and from the office, when I exercise and when I iron (even the NYT reporters iron!). I have thus doubled my reading capacity”. Hopefully you'll find some time for your kids too.
Still, it's a great thing. And you can do even more.
There is an Amazon tool called Whispersync for Voice which allows, if supported by the book, to synchronize Audible with Kindle applications in such a way that the system always keeps the reading point by switching from one application to another, as happens in a relay race. Thus productivity can skyrocket. Be careful though, because systematic use can damage the labyrinth and generate vertigo.
Malcolm Gladwell
There are some authors who now write books (let's say screenplays?) only for the audio edition and then from this main version they make the book as a result product. In the world of cinema it has been the case for some time that a book is based on a film with an original screenplay.
The most fanatical of these audio-authors is truly a character mainstream, Canadian sociologist Malcolm Gladwell. I think we all know his books that have given rise to numerous neologisms. I recall a few, almost all published in Italy by Mondadori: The critical point (2000) In the blink of an eye (2005) Fuoriclasse (2008) David and Goliath (2014) The stranger's dilemma (2019) and the latest The Bomber Mafia (2021)
Together with Michael Lewis, he is perhaps the author who more than others has confirmed Roland Barthes' theory on the disappearance of genres and the advent of writing tout-court which nullifies every genre boundary.
Pushkin Industries
Suffice it to say here that, in the meantime, Gladwell co-founded (with Jacob Weisberg) and presides over a podcast and audiobook production company called Pushkin Industries, a name that already embodies the mission the house.
Recently Gladwell, in an interview with the weekend supplement (Life & Arts) of the "Financial Times", returned to the meaning of audio production for his work as a writer and how it has changed his way of telling stories. He said:
“When I was younger, I often made the mistake of making hasty decisions in the process of writing a story. I'm much more open now. The podcast has helped me a lot. Podcasts, I get, are a team effort. It's no longer a lonely job. It's the wonderful function of the team that makes the difference, it's the reactions of its members that give you the opportunity to review and review and change your mind and start over. It's an objective pressure to always keep an open mind."
Well said: keep an open mind, the dilemma is always the same. It can only be done by comparison. Even if the Sistine Chapel was painted by a single person who locked himself inside.
