“His stated purpose in The Untold Story of the Talking Book is not to weigh up the comparative advantages of media forms but to parse the whole concept of reading through the history of one of them.”
“What do we mean when we say we’ve read, or in Hungerford’s case, not read, a book? How do we imagine it getting into our brain? Rubery’s pitch for this as his real question is risky given that what he actually delivers is a detailed, lively, and well-peopled history of the technologies, economies, and organizations that have driven the recording of novels over the last 150 years. The more abstract question of what reading is floats around, mostly out of sight, as something the book leaves us to answer for ourselves.”
“The Untold Story of the Talking Book maps how closely the histories of reading and consumer choice are intertwined.”
“It’s interesting to note that legere, the Latin verb for read, is also the word for choose. And this, in some sense, is what Rubery’s study teaches us: to the extent that “listening” has been seen as a poor substitute for reading, it is because it has seemed to limit rather than open up access to text.”
“The unhappier beneficiaries of audiobook libraries complain in these terms, not so much that listening is a poor substitute for visually picking out of words on a page, but that they can’t choose the texts they want — or which pages to skip, or how a book sounds. The simple answer to the question Rubery asks us — what is reading? — turns out to be that it is something we’ve associated more closely with choice than we might have realized.”
“But of course, this would also suggest that Amazon is Enlightenment’s telos: the real reader’s paradise. This might, as Rubery ever so gently suggests, be cause enough for pause.”