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Audio books didn't kill paper books. But some books, they say, are still better heard than read. By Aresh Shirali What have people in the world's biggest market for mostly everything---America---been reading? There's really no objective way of getting that right, especially in this age of the internet, but sales figures of any kind always offer some clues. Take the books scenario. According to broad estimates based on US sales data put out by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the year 2003 offers some significant trends. Overall, publishing in America grew in single digits (in dollar terms). Adult hardcover, which, as a market worth around a billion dollars, accounts for every fourth dollar spent on books, grew an anaemic 1.4 per cent in 2003. 'Adult', by the way, simply means 'non-children' here. Adult paperbacks---worth another billion odd---did slightly better, growing roughly 6.9 per cent. Religious books, a market estimated at some $150 million, meanwhile, leapt 37 per cent in 2003. Eyebrow-raising, yes. But look at the books that are not strictly speaking being read, at least not in the conventional sense. Electronic books, a category introduced only a couple of years ago, shot up 45 per cent---and is about to outsell audio books, a $50-million market that grew 13 per cent in 2003. The dollars figures are still not very impressive, but they have revived talk of whether the classic book---y'know, the one with paper sheets bound together---is finally on its way out after a good millennium and more of service. The story has been heard before. Paper is an inefficient means of data storage, not to mention transmission. Digital is much better. Sooner or later, goes the reasoning, economic efficiency will trump romantic habituation. So it's bye bye books. But guess what: the digital world hasn't been all that unkind to books. In fact, if there's one big effect the internet has had, it's been to give books a big boost. Think Amazon.com. Most studies suggest that the advent of global digital connectivity has been accompanied by a burst of book reading in the classic format. This is so the world over, not just America. Whatever the country you come from is called, needs are needs. Books meet some of those needs, and that's that, irrespective of technology. The joker in the pack, however, is the audio book. At first, people were bullish on its prospects simply because they were pressed for time. An audio book, went the logic, could be absorbed on the drive to work. The audio story has changed, since. The advantage of the voice format, say its current proponents, is two-fold. It conveys intonations, notifying textual emphasis and emotional tenor, and if that's not enough, it affords background sound effects as well. To the extent that voice inflexions and musical effects enrich any form of communication, the audio book should emerge a winner. Of course, you could argue... then why have a book at all? Just have an audio-visual composition. Wouldn't visual razzmatazz do even better? No, print will say, words are words. They have integrity. They gain memorability if they're poetic, but they're still words. Audio-visual embellishment takes on a pre-interpretative role that is best left to the reader's liberty. It's difficult enough that words in themselves, as Derrida pointed out, are open to contextual interpretation. Words, the man said, end up in the public domain---free to be processed differently in different minds. Derrida himself is no longer around to express his opinion on sound-enhanced audio books, or to clarify what he meant by everything he wrote and said. But Bob Dylan certainly is. At 64, his second book, Chronicles: Volume One, hit the market on 12 October 2004. After three years of 'splendid isolation', America's legendary folk singer, a man who made effective use of poetic derision to make America question itself, seems almost stark raving mad in his determination to take charge of his own voice. And make his point. Dylan seems to make a distinction between audio and print media. Symbolism and metaphors are all very good in folk music, he has said, but there comes a time when you have to hold your hand up and offer testimony. "When you write a book like this, you gotta tell the truth, and it can't be misinterpreted," Dylan is reported to have said over coffee at an undisclosed location in America's Midwest with Newsweek's David Gates. Now Dylan's new book has an audio version as well (voiced by Sean Penn). Anyone who has raved about the pluses of an audio book would say that if there's any book that's better heard than read, it must be this (though whether Penn's voice is a good enough substitute is a good question). Yet, the book, written originally in ALL CAPS, was written for a specific reason and intended as a book---to be read, like any other. To trivialise the poet's earnest attempt to explain himself would do unto him the sort of injustice he raised his voice so passionately against. Listen up, he seems to be saying, if an artist must assume some moral responsibility for what his interpreters make of his art, the least they owe him is a better understanding. It's a plea. Heed it, one must. Better heard than read----or better read than heard? It's a false dichotomy, really, when placed in the larger context. If Dylan seems so painfully aware of the public domain, it's to do with what people make of his words, not how they get across. Words, once out, are out. It's a whole world out there, like it or not. Voices travel. Thoughts vary. Tempers flare. Who's on who's side turns into a squabble of shrieky proportions... leaving the sideless poet in turmoil. So where does that leave the rest? In thought, hopefully, whether it's because of words in print or the resonance of an audio book. And, in all innocence----no side-claiming----with earnest questions on sordid attempts to manipulate what cannot be. Truth.
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