Comment on Cory Doctorow New Book: Enshitification
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 4 days agoNot true, even highly educated Roman and Greek elites would attend book readings. It was considered a leisure activity and appreciated it as the performance it was, same as today.
In fact today we have more reasons than ever to listen to audiobooks, the most significant of which is that it’s not legal nor advisable to read a physical book while driving a motor vehicle.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
Somehow, I don’t think the original commenter was referring to their memories of ancient Greece or Rome…
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Well yeah, because the original commenter wasn’t referring to their memories of any period of time, because the period of time they’re referring to doesn’t exist.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
It existed in the 90s and early 00s when I was growing up, before streaming tech took over audio books.
Just because the concept of reading books out loud already existed, doesn’t mean that they don’t remember a time when it wasn’t more popular than just reading.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I was around in the 90s and early 00s and I can assure you it very much did not. The popularity of audiobooks grew significantly in the 90s. Books on tape had been a thing for awhile already and the popularity of audiobooks on CD exploded in the early to mid 90s. You could buy or even rent them from music stores, libraries, video stores, even supermarkets. They even had little listening stations where you could hear the first chapter of popular books before buying them.
In 1995 Audible was founded and brought about the advent of digital audiobooks downloaded from the internet which only accelerated their popularity. By the time the 00s started audiobooks were a multi billion dollar industry.
Well that’s also a misunderstanding of the history of Audiobooks because I believe even now I don’t believe audiobooks are more popular than reading physical books.