![]() It was the opposite: Audio made books so relaxing and pleasurable that a listener couldn’t engage critically with the text in a way a serious reader should. Strangely, the problem with the audio format was not that it made books less enjoyable. Prominent literary figures tended to be particularly skeptical of listening to books. In a 1993 Wall Street Journal article on stagnating audiobook sales, one Random House executive lamented that “too many people still think audio books are only for the blind.” Listening to novels no longer seemed like a utopian fantasy at all. And yet, by the time portable cassette players became ubiquitous in the 1980s, the mood about listening to books had changed in a way that would have surprised 19th-century audio enthusiasts. It took a full century, but the technology finally did catch up to Nymanover’s vision of a world in which people could walk down the street listening to books. An 1885 essay in the influential British literary magazine The Nineteenth Century maintained that Nymanover’s whispering machine would be a “boon to our poor abused eyes,” and also that when we read print, “one half the power of literature is lost.” “The advantages of such books over those printed,” Edison wrote, “are too readily seen to need mention.” And Edison wasn’t the only one who thought listening to books would be obviously superior to reading. He hoped to open a publishing house in New York that would sell novels recorded on six-inch circular plates. After announcing the invention of the phonograph six years earlier, Thomas Edison turned almost immediately to the device’s implications for literature. Though mocked by some, Nymanover’s vision of a book recording in a hat wasn’t entirely far-fetched in 1883. ![]() Nymanover called the device a “whispering machine” and suggested that it could be placed inside of a hat so that someone walking down the street or reclining in bed “could be perpetually listening” to great works of literature. I n 1883, Evert Nymanover, a Swedish scholar at the University of Minnesota, proposed a new invention that some thought would affect the future of humankind: a device that played recordings of books.
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