Marvi Lacar for The New York Times

Rich Cohen, 36, out with Scout and an audio book

May 26, 2005
Loud, Proud, Unabridged: It Is Too Reading!
By AMY HARMON

JIM HARRIS, a lifelong bookworm, cracked the covers of only four books last year. But he listened to 54, all unabridged. He listened to Harry Potter and "Moby-Dick," Don DeLillo and Stephen King. He listened in the car, eating lunch, doing the dishes, sitting in doctors' offices and climbing the stairs at work.

"I haven't read this much since I was in college," said Mr. Harris, 53, a computer programmer in Memphis. And yes, he does consider it "reading." "I dislike it when I meet people who feel listening is inferior," he said.

Fortunately for Mr. Harris, the ranks of the reading purists are dwindling. Fewer Americans are reading books than a decade ago, according to the National Endowment for the Arts, but almost a third more are listening to them on tapes, CD's and iPods.

For a growing group of devoted listeners, the popularity of audio books is redefining the notion of reading, which for centuries has been centered on the written word. Traditionally, it is also an activity that has required one's full attention.

But audio books, once seen as a kind of oral CliffsNotes for reading lightweights, have seduced members of a literate but busy crowd by allowing them to read while doing something else. Digital audio that can be zapped onto an MP3 player is also luring converts. The smallest iPod, the Shuffle, holds roughly four books; the newest ones include a setting that speeds up the narration without raising the pitch.

"I wish I had had this feature while listening to 'Crime and Punishment,' " said Lee Kyle, 41, a math teacher in Austin, Tex., who now listens in bed instead of reading. It's more relaxing, he said, and he doesn't have to bother his wife with the light.

Audio books, which still represent only about 3 percent of all books sold, do not exactly herald a return to the Homeric tradition. But their growing popularity has sparked debate among readers, writers and cultural critics about the best way to consume literature.

"I think every writer would rather have people read books, committed as we are to the word," said Frank McCourt, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his memoir, "Angela's Ashes." "But I'd rather have them listen to it than not at all."

To make the audio version of his books more tolerable, Mr. McCourt said, he insists on narrating them himself. "Actors are always doing this phony breathing," Mr. McCourt said.

Among the questions facing audio book connoisseurs are: Which is better suited to the format, fiction or nonfiction? Can a bad narrator ruin a great book? If you've listened to a book, have you really "read" it?

Rich Cohen, the author of "Tough Jews," has found short stories are best while walking his dog on the Upper West Side, because of the likelihood of distraction, and the difficulty in rewinding.

"Sometimes your dog will attack another dog, and you're pulled completely out of the book," explained Mr. Cohen, who has experimented with various genres since discovering he could purchase audio books from Apple's online music store.

A book about string theory by the physicist Brian Greene proved entirely unable to hold Mr. Cohen's auditory attention, as did "Hamlet." With "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," however, he had the multitasking satisfaction of digesting a book he had always been curious about but did not want to devote the time to actually reading.

David Lipsky, another New York writer and frequent dog walker, said he often "shuffles" music on his iPod, and has similarly come to enjoy jumping among chapters of, say, James Joyce, Martin Amis and Al Franken as he circles the block.

Charlton Heston reading "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" proved a dud, even if it was sandwiched between Jeremy Irons reading "Lolita" and Robert Frost reading his own poems. "You keep waiting for him to announce that Kilimanjaro's been taken over by damned dirty talking apes," Mr. Lipsky said. "Now it's hard to read 'Kilimanjaro' without hearing Heston's voice."

The novelist Sue Miller said she prefers Henry James on tape because the narrator has untangled the complex sentences for her. But she found D. H. Lawrence unbearable. His notoriously repetitive prose "doesn't lend itself to an auditory experience," she said.

Some critics are dismayed at the migration to audio books. The virtue of reading, they say, lies in the communion between writer and reader, the ability to pause, to reread a sentence, and yes, read it out loud - to yourself. Listeners are opting for convenience, they say, at the expense of engaging the mind and imagination as only real reading can.

"Deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear," said Harold Bloom, the literary critic. "You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you."

The comedian Jon Stewart, an author of the mock history textbook "America (The Book)," opens the audio version by lampooning the format. "Welcome, nonreader," he intones. Listeners are advised that the listening experience "should not be considered a replacement for watching television."

Audio book aficionados face disdain from some book lovers, who tend to rhapsodize about the smell and feel of a book in their hands and the pleasure of being immersed in a story without having to worry about the car in the next lane.

Gloria Reiss, 51, of St. Louis, said her officemates correct her when she mentions having read a book.

"They'll say, 'You didn't read it, you just listened to it,' " said Ms. Reiss, who switched to audio when her two jobs and three poodles made it hard to find time to curl up on the couch. Recently a colleague refused her urging to take a Stephanie Plum mystery along on a long drive.

"She goes, 'I like to read my books,' " Ms. Reiss said, "like that makes her better than me."

Most audio book lovers argue that one is not better than the other. Some say it was not until they started listening to books that they realized how much of the language they were skimming over in the books they read on paper. And then there is the sheer pleasure of being read to.

Ms. Reiss's husband, Ken, says he remembers more of books that he hears, perhaps because he's simply wired that way. Levi Wallach, 36, of Vienna, Va., says he's a slow reader, "so it's much more efficient for me to listen while I do other things."

Libraries say the growth in circulation of audio books is outpacing overall circulation. Book clubs are increasingly made up of hybrid listener-readers, and the market for children's audio books is booming. Sales at Audible, the leading provider of digital audio books, surged from $5 million in 2001 to $34 million last year. Half of its subscribers are new to audio books.

Still, a certain stigma lingers. Dan Barber, a chef, said he felt compelled to ask Louis Menand's permission to listen to his book, "The Metaphysical Club," on CD when Mr. Menand dined at his Greenwich Village restaurant, Blue Hill, last month.

Mr. Menand assented, but his dining companion, Adam Gopnik, the New Yorker writer, looked put off, Mr. Barber said. Or maybe Mr. Barber was projecting his own ambivalence about audio, as evidenced by his consumption of Mr. Gopnik's anthology, "Paris to the Moon."

"I read parts of it on tape," Mr. Barber said. "But I also read the whole book - what do you call it? Traditional-style?"

John Hamburg, 34, notes that audio books can be shared in a way that printed ones cannot. Mr. Hamburg and Mr. Barber, high school friends, were both sobbing while listening to "Tuesdays With Morrie" during a drive, Mr. Hamburg said.

Listening to authors read their own memoirs introduces an intimacy that cannot be achieved without the audio, Mr. Hamburg said. He found Bill Clinton's thick autobiography a bit daunting, for instance, but said listening to it "was kind of like being with an old friend."

Mr. Hamburg, a screenwriter, says he limits his audio habit to biography, eschewing fiction out of respect for authors whom he imagines did not intend for their creative work to be read "when you're doing 30 minutes on your elliptical trainer."

But when he came across the audio version of "The Kite Runner" online, it was hard to resist downloading it. The hardcover version of the novel, a coming-of-age story set in Afghanistan, has been sitting unopened on Mr. Hamburg's night table for weeks. It's still there.

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- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 4:35 PM