What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading Audiobook (Free)

Reports from the loss of life of reading are greatly exaggerated

Do you worry that you’ve lost tolerance for anything much longer than a tweet? If therefore, you’re not only. Digital-age pundits warn that as our hunger for books dwindles, therefore too perform the virtues in which printed, bound objects once trained us: the willpower to focus on a sustained argument, the attention to appear beyond the day’s information, the willingness to be only. The shelves from the world’s great libraries, though, inform a more complicated story. Evaluating the wear and tear within the books that they contain, British professor Leah Price finds scant evidence that a fantastic age of reading ever existed. In the dawn of mass literacy to the invention from the paperback, most readers currently skimmed and multitasked. Print-era doctors also forbade the very same silent absorption now recommended as a cure for electronic addictions. The data that books are dying demonstrates actually scarcer. In encounters with librarians, booksellers and activists who are reinventing old ways of reading, Cost offers fresh desire to bibliophiles and literature lovers alike.