Literacy

Silent private reading is a comparatively recent default. For most of the history of written text, reading was performed: aloud, to a group, often by the one person present who could do it. The recorded book is not a departure from reading. It is a return to the older arrangement using different equipment.

Organised recorded reading began as a service for blind and partially sighted readers, and the constraints of that origin shaped the form. Recordings were made unabridged, because the point was access to the text rather than to a performance of it. Reading was clear and comparatively plain. Navigation was a serious problem, since a reader needs to find a chapter, re-hear a paragraph and hold a position, and every format from disc to cassette to digital file has had to solve it again.

That navigation problem is the most underrated difference between print and audio. A print reader flicks back half a page without conscious effort. An audio reader performs a search. Structured audio formats that carry chapter and heading markers exist precisely to restore that capability, and material published without them is significantly harder to study from, whatever its recording quality.

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