Luke Hickey:

Yuma, good evening everyone. Welcome to the National Library of Australia. I'm Luke Hickey. I'm the Assistant Director General of the Engagement Branch here. Thank you for joining us on this chilly Canberra evening, whether you're here in person or one of the 200 people that we've got tuning in tonight via our live stream. It's wonderful to see a room and an online room full of readers, listeners, creators, academics, and more importantly, lovers of stories. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land that we're on, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. I want to acknowledge their ongoing connection to this land and to this place and pay my respects to their elders past and present. I'd also like to extend that through them to all First Nations people here tonight or watching online. And it is a real privilege for us at the National Library here where the custodians of many stories, of many nations from across Australia, their stories, their language and their culture that resides in our collections and that we're truly privileged to be the custodians of.

This evening, we turn our attention to a subject that is both modern and also deeply rooted in history, the evolution of the audiobook. While many of us think of audio books as a relatively modern convenience, partnered with smartphones, earbuds, and long commutes, but as you'll hear tonight, their story stretches back nearly 150 years, beginning with the earliest experiments in recorded sound. Our event tonight is also a reflection of the strong and continuing partnership between the National Library of Australia and the Centre of Australian Literary Cultures at ANU. Together, we've been able to bring research, creativity, and public engagement into the same room. And this connection with the National Library's collections and the center's deep expertise in the study of literature and reading cultures is really exciting for us. It's a collaboration that enriches both institutions and it's one that helps us share new ideas, new scholarship, and more importantly, new conversations with audiences across Australia.

To speak on this future, it's now my pleasure to invite Dr. Millicent Weber, ARC, Discovery Early Career Research Award Fellow, and senior lecturer in English at the School of Literature, languages, and linguistics to the stage. Millie's got a particular interest in the role technology plays in how books are written, published, and read, and has also worked as an archivist in the University of Melbourne Archives and here at the National Library of Australia. So welcome home, Millie. Millie is going to introduce our guest tonight, Professor Matthew Rubri. So welcome to you as well, Matthew. But please join me in welcoming Millie to the stage.

Millicent Weber:

Cheers, Luke. I'll just speak for one minute on behalf of ANU and then I'll pass over to Matt. So thank you so much to the National Library for hosting this evening's talk. And I'd also like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples as the traditional owners of the land on which we're meeting tonight. I pay my respects to elders past and present, and of course, extend this to any First Nations people who are in the room today. Particularly given our focus tonight on audio books, I think it's really important to acknowledge the long history of a reality for First Nations peoples. As a mode of storytelling and of sharing knowledge and culture, the spoken word has shaped the history of this country for tens of thousands of years. So as Luke mentioned, I'm a senior lecturer and research fellow in the English department at the ANU, where I write and teach about and with audio books.

And it's with the generous support of the ANU and particularly the Research School for Humanities and the Arts that Professor Matthew Rubery is joining us in Canberra. And so I'm very thrilled to be able to introduce him to you all tonight. So a professor of modern literature at the Queen Mary University of London, Matt has written widely and influentially about audio books. The Untold Story of the Talking Book, which was published by Harvard University Press, celebrates its 10th birthday this year. This book broke enormous intellectual ground. It examines the power dynamics, the politics, the commercial interests, and the social missions, as well as the technological developments that shaped the history of talking books in the United States. Matt's most recent book, Reader's Block, which was published by Stanford University Press in 2022, looks at how neurodivergence shapes reading and examines how diverse the practise of reading really is.

So tonight, Matt's promised us a tour of the 150-year history of audiobooks, one that takes on pressing questions. Does listening count as reading? Should narrators perform? Can audio books do more than imitate printed ones? There is no one better placed to address these questions, and so I would like you to please join me in welcoming Professor Matt Rubbery.

Matthew Rubery:

Hello, everyone. Let me begin by thanking ANU for making this talk tonight possible, and thanks also to the National Library for hosting this event. It's a real pleasure to be speaking somewhere that takes books seriously, especially since audiobooks haven't always been taken seriously. In fact, I vividly remember when my interest in this project began. It was a conversation I had with a friend of my dad's about 15 years ago. My dad was a builder, so a lot of his associates were not very literary. And this friend who knew I was a professor of literature and studied books for a living, was very excited to come up and tell me that he had read a book recently. And then I watched him as he paused, backtracked, and apologised, and said, "Well, I didn't actually read it. I listened to it. " I was thrilled that this family friend had encountered books in any form, so I was sort of struck by why did he apologise and realised that audiobooks are perhaps the only form of reading for which people do apologise.

And it got me thinking then about how audiobooks exist in this strange limbo where they are books because they have the same words as printed books, but also not books and that they are a different form of technology. So it was something I realised I hadn't taken very seriously to that point. I'd been studying books for years and listening to audiobooks, but I never really thought about studying audiobooks until that moment when I resolved to poke around and learn more about the history of this curious format. And what I discovered is that audiobooks have a surprisingly long history. And even though they might feel like a modern invention, something that we associate with our phones or other digital devices, their history actually stretches back nearly 150 years. So this evening, I'd like to share with you my research into the audiobooks evolution. To do this, I will single out six key stages in the audiobook's development, and I will show you plenty of images so you know exactly what I'm talking about when I discuss these various forms of technology, and I will play recordings as well, so you can get a sense of how styles of reading have evolved over the last century and a half.

The main point I'll be making today is that audiobooks developed both as a way of reproducing printed books and as a way of overcoming the printed book's limitations. Some publishers try to stick as closely as possible to print and try to make the experience of listening to a book feel as bookish as possible and other publishers, especially in the last decade or so, try to make the most of sound recording by using audiobooks to do things that printed books just can't do. So they might add celebrity voices or sound effects or musical scores, things like that. The way I think about this is that the emphasis in the word audiobook can be either on audio or on book. And I think it's the tension between those two terms that makes it so difficult for people to decide whether audiobooks should be considered as books or something else altogether.

So having given you a sort of broad overview, let me jump right into the first stage, what were known as phonographic books. And I'm going to take us all the way back to 1877 and Edison's ... Let me just get another image here. So this is an image of Thomas Edison's laboratory where he was demonstrating the earliest device to record sound. So this is the phonograph invented in 1877. And if you kind of look at this strange contraption, you'll see that it is basically a cylinder turned by a hand crank. And these early devices used a sheet of tinfoil, so not yet a record. And you could wrap a sheet of tinfoil around that cylinder. And then when someone spoke into that big funnel, the speech would create indentations on the sheet of tinfoil that could then be replayed and you could voila hear recorded sound.

Now, theoretically, you could take this sheet of tinfoil off the cylinder and take it with you and wrap it around another one and replay it. But of course, these sheets of tinfoil were very delicate and usually tore or just wore out quite quickly. So a big difference between sort of the hype around this machine and how easy it was to use in practise. Later, wax cylinders would be used to record these sonic indentations and then the discs or records that many of you will be more familiar with. So the very first recording made on this device could be considered a early audiobook. It was at least a spoken word recording. It was a nursery rhyme titled Mary Had a Little Lamb. So not exactly an audiobook, but definitely the start of a tradition of spoken word recordings and an indication of what direction this device would go in the future.

To his credit, Edison immediately spotted the machine's potential. He proposed lots of uses for this device. And again, just remember before this time, if a family member died, you never heard their voice again. So this was a complete transformation in the ability to preserve voices, sounds of all sorts. So Edison thought that this device would be used to play music, which of course became its main use in the future, but he also thought it would be used to write letters. You could send sort of audible letters through the post to each other. He thought it could be used to teach people to speak properly. And he also had in mind that it could be used for gadgets like clocks that would announce the hours of the day. Of course, he also saw that the phonograph would be used to read aloud. So I want to share with you a long quotation from an article Edison wrote all the way back in 1878 that shows that what we tend to think of as a quite recent technology was already something people were thinking about in the 19th century.

So I'll read this aloud to you so you can see what Edison had in mind. Books may be read by the charitably inclined professional reader or by such readers, especially employed for that purpose and the record of each book used in the asylums of the blind, hospitals, the sick chamber, or even with great prophet and amusement by the lady or gentlemen whose eyes and hands may be otherwise employed. Or again, because of the greater enjoyment to be had from a book when read by an elocutionist than when read by the average reader.

So a few things stand out to me here. First, of course, that Edison was already thinking about audiobooks, but also he was thinking about the audience for these books. It's important to note that these recorded books were never meant for people with disabilities alone. Through much of the 20th century, this format is associated with blind people in particular, people who couldn't read in any other way. But notice here that Edison is already imagining other people using audiobooks as well. So ladies or gentlemen whose eyes or hands may be otherwise employed, I think he's pretty right in that prediction. And then in a more controversial prediction, that last line, he says that some people will just want to listen to a reader who's very skilled at reading and can do it better than we can in our imagination. Now, my sense, most people sort of value reading and this idea that no matter how good of a reader you are, there's value to imagining what words sound like in your own imagination.

So Edison's already proposing though that some people are just very skilled entertaining readers and we should celebrate that. You might think of this as an analogy to a musical score. We don't tend to look at a musical score and imagine what those instruments might sound like in our mind, but we do do that with books. Edison is saying, no, we should, just like we listen to professional musicians play a musical score, books should be read that way as well. So controversial idea, but worth thinking about. And Edison was definitely right about the phonograph's potential for entertainment, but the reality at this time was another matter. Edison quickly proposed almost immediately after inventing this device that he could record an entire Dickens novel on wax cylinders. So took a big fat novel by Dickens and said he could record that, but this was wildly optimistic because these sheets of tinfoil or the wax liners could only record a couple of minutes of sound at the most.

So a Dickens novel would take hundreds of these cylinders and who would have the patience to replace those every couple of minutes. But this did not stop people from looking forward to a time when the book would be transformed by this technology. And you get a lot of predictions about what the future of the book will look like after the invention of sound recording technology. Let me give you an example then. This is an illustration from a newspaper in the year 1878.

It portrays an idealised domestic scene in which a family is gathered around the dinner table, but instead of the father reading a book aloud to the family, as would have previously been the case, there is a phonograph playing a disc in the middle of the table and it is playing an audiobook. The father can now sit back and enjoy his cigar. The mother, her hands are free for knitting, and then the children sort of watch on and wrapped attention as the book is read aloud. So you might think about how the introduction of this technology could possibly feel threatening at this time because it would be replacing human labour, but this scene definitely domesticates it, makes it feel as if the machine will just kind of lead to more free time so people can enjoy their cigars or their knitting and let the machine do the work for them.

So remember that this is in 1878 and over the next couple of decades, people continued to imagine how books would be reshaped by sound technology, even though this technology wasn't yet very useful, at least for audiobooks. So to take one of the most memorable examples from the end of the 19th century, here's what a story published in 1894 predicted that the book of the future would look like. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Victorian Walkman. This is an illustration of a man sauntering down the boulevard with what looks uncannily like a Walkman, but of course the Walkman is not invented till a hundred years later. So instead of this being a cassette player that this gentleman is walking around with, that's actually a little miniature record player in that device. And instead of listening to the book read aloud on AirPods or earbuds, he has what were called hearing tubes connected to his ears there.

But notice how much this image gets right. The artist was spot on in predicting that there'd be a shift towards miniaturisation, taking these sort of big bulky record players and making them small enough that they could be carried around in your pocket. There's also a shift towards portability that people weren't tethered to the dinner table, but can now sort of walk around town and listen to stories while they're doing their errands. And finally, it gets it right that people would not just listen to music on these devices, but would listen to spoken word recordings like audiobooks. Now, I promised I would play some sound recordings, so I want to play a recording from 1890, and this is of Alfred Tennyson reading a poem aloud. I think it'll give you a real contrast to later audiobooks. Tennyson is a great reader, but of course the recording is still going to sound like it's made over a hundred years ago.

Let me play this now and see what you think.

Okay. So I realise that's not an easy recording to listen to for very long, but I remember the first time I heard that recording getting chills because I did not realise that voices had been recorded so long ago. So you can only record short poems say conveniently on this device, but it is looking ahead towards tradition of recording much longer poems and eventually novels. So this takes me to the second stage of the audiobook's development, and that is what we're known as talking books. This brings us up to the 20th century when the first full length books were recorded nearly 50 years after Edison's prediction. And this took place when talking book libraries for blind people were established in both America and Britain. There was no full length recorded book before 1930. It just wasn't possible because the records could only record a couple minutes still.

It was both expensive and impractical, but it was around this time that recorded books became a realistic possibility following advances in technology in both the film and radio business. There was a major push to develop a way of recording books to help veterans, like the ones in this slide, who came back from the First World War with eye injuries. They'd lost their sight, so no longer had any way to read for themselves. This though led to the technology that we all benefit from today, long playing records that could play up to 20 minutes per side. So ironically, one of the world's most brutal wars was responsible for the benefits enjoyed by millions of civilians in its aftermath. Beginning in 1934 then, the American Foundation for the Blind in the US and the Royal National Institute of Blind People in Britain started recording books onto these long playing records.

I'm putting up an image now of a record next to one of the books that was first made onto them, and these records could record up to 20 minutes per side. So that meant that the average size novel would fit into about 10 discs. Some books, of course, were easier to record than others. So I'm going to put up an image now that shows books of various thickness on top of a stack of records showing how many it would take to record them. And in the top centre of that image is a copy of War and Peace, one of the longest novels we could think of, of course, and it took 119 records to record that book. So still a lot of flipping and makes me appreciate how easy we have it today with digital downloads on our phones. And if you just look up in the top corner of that slide, there's that hard case.

That would be how they were sent through the post for people to listen to. The first talking books ever recorded then included the Bible, Shakespeare, unsurprisingly, and even a handful of bestselling contemporary novels from the time. So readers enjoyed the benefits of these talking books almost immediately. Here's an image of a soldier who lost one of his eyes and can no longer read without difficulty, with a big smile on his face as he hears a story read aloud through the record player. This technology also soon benefited civilians. Here is a woman knitting while she's able to sit back and enjoy hearing a story read aloud to her. And even though braille readers could already read for themselves, you might keep in mind that only about 20% of blind people then were able to read braille. It is a very difficult skill to learn if you lose your sight late in life, as many people do.

So 80% of blind people had no way of reading until these talking book recordings came along. So this woman is able to knit and this man, I'm showing this slide now, even though he is a braille reader, he likes listening to talking books occasionally because it frees up his hands so he can smoke cigarettes.

There were many benefits to these talking book records as well. So one I've mentioned is independence, a form of entertainment for people who often didn't have much to do, but also they were valued for companionship or social inclusion. A lot of people felt they had a personal relationship with these voices they'd hear reading aloud to them. And there were lots of benefits recognised for people's mental health, something I think we're much more sensitive to today. What I found then, while researching the history of reading and blind people, was that many of the questions still debated today were first debated among blind people. So some of the questions brought up earlier were first raised as early as the 1930s and they were questions like, is listening to a book the same as reading it? Should a book be read in a dramatic way to make it as entertaining as possible or in a neutral way to leave space to the reader's imagination?

And finally, what can audiobooks do that printed books can't? So even in the 1930s when audiobooks were just starting, one of the first recorded books was a biography of Mozart. Instead of just describing what Mozart's his music sounded like, actual clips from Mozart's sonatas or symphonies were included with the talking book. So quite an exciting innovation. One of the lessons I took from working both on blind people, but also with blind people was that the question about whether listening to a book counts as reading becomes much more complicated when you bring in readers with disabilities. A lot of blind people were avid readers their entire life until losing their eyesight. So does it make sense to say they can't read since they only listen to books? And a lot of blind people are really attentive listeners as well. They're not kind of listening to books in the background.

They're often giving at their full attention and could often quote verbatim entire passages from memory. Now I'm going to play you the oldest surviving talking book made in Britain. I spent several years searching for those recordings. I think this is the second book ever made and it is Joseph Conrad's novel Typhoon. I've never found the original recording of an Agatha Christie novel, but this is the same narrator named Anthony McDonald who made the very first recording. So you're hearing the first narrator in Britain.

Anthony McDonald, Narrator:

Typhoon by Joseph Conrad, written in 1903, recorded for the talking book

Matthew Rubery:

Turn up the volume a bit.

Anthony McDonald, Narrator:

Typhoon by Joseph Conrad, written in 1903, recorded for the talking book Libraries for the blind by kind permission of the trustees for the state of the late Joseph Conrad. Chapter one. Captain McQuare of the [unclear] that in the order of material appearances was the exact counterpart of his mind. It presented no marked characteristics of firmness or stupidity. It had no pronounced characteristics, whatever. It was simply ordinary, irresponsive, and unruffled. The only thing this aspect might have been said to suggest at times was best for it, because he would sit in business offices ashore.

Matthew Rubery:

Okay. Apologies for cutting you off. I don't want you to get absorbed in the story. I'm more interested in just so you can compare voices as an improvement over Tennyson and just hear the different voice styles as well and how they change over time. This brings me then to the audiobook's third stage, recorded books for a commercial audience. So the talking books we just heard solve the problem of making it possible for blind people to read books, but sighted people who wanted to listen to books were still out of luck, at least until the 1950s when the commercial market for recorded books started with a label called Cadman Records. Now, Cadman wasn't the first company to make literary recordings, but it was the first to make them available to a mass audience. And they did this by taking advantage of long playing records, which had only been available to blind people until about 1948, and then suddenly everyone could use these records.

Cadman's real challenge wasn't recording books though. It was persuading book lovers to start buying records. The company's mission was to persuade potential customers that spoken word recordings not only reproduced works of literature verbatim, but it also enhanced the experience of listening to them. Blind people often had no choice to listen to talking book because they couldn't read them in print, but why should other readers listen to them rather than read them? So Cadman wanted to make the case that the listening experience could be even better than reading it in print. So there's a good story here about the company's founders, the two women that are pictured in the slide and how they started the label. These women had just graduated from university. They were both 22, I believe, and they tracked down the poet, Dylan Thomas, to invite him to read his poems for their first album.

Dylan Thomas was a bit of a rockstar at this time. He had such a great poetry reading voice, a big booming barrel organ voice. He'd been trained in elocution at English schools, but also had a sort of Welsh lilt. So just charming to listen to and attracted audiences of young women in particular. When these founders were able to get ahold of him, they persuaded him to come into the studio, read his poems for their first record. When he did so though, he finished all his poems and it only filled up the first side of the record. There was nothing on the B side yet. So he just offered to read a story that he'd recently published just kind of spontaneously. This story, A Child's Christmas and Wales became one of the 20th century's most popular spoken word recordings. To this day, the mere mention of Thomas's story brings a smile to the faces of many of my friends who grew up listening to it and many still listen to it on Christmas Day every year.

Now, a lot of media historians have since credited this impromptu recording session with establishing the origins of the audiobook industry. So at the very least, I would say that proved that spoken recordings could be both commercially viable and culturally significant. And people like me still find it very difficult to read Dylan Thomas's poems and print without hearing that Cadman voice in my head. Cadman was one of the first labels to specialise exclusively in spoken word recordings of literature. And we shouldn't forget how rare it was to be able to hear your favourite author's voice at this time either. We take it for granted now because you can hear any author just by reaching into your pocket and checking on your phone. But this was not the case at the time. You might never hear the voice of your favourite author. So Cadman answered the question that was on many readers' minds.

What did authors actually sound like? And the label went on to record many of the 20th century's most influential writers. So just listen to this list of names of authors that they recorded. T.S. Elliot, W.H. Auden, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, Thomas Mahn, and W.B. Yates. So as you can see, these women had exquisite taste and captured the voices of many of the world's best authors. Despite this highbrow reading list though, Kadman was often accused of being middle brow for the way it took these challenging works of literature and made them accessible to the general public. And you can see the emergence of another controversy here. Is it the content that matters in audiobooks? So again, audiobooks have the exact same words as the printed books. So is that what is important or is it the mode of delivery that matters?

Does having someone else read these words aloud to you somehow change the experience of reading them in a crucial way? So I've hyped up this Dylan Thomas recording. So let me play an excerpt from that so you can hear what made him such a electrifying reader at the time.

Dylan Thomas, Narrator:

One Christmas was so much like the other in those years around the seaton corner now. Out of all sound except the distance speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was 12, or whether it snowed for 12 days and 12 nights when I was six. All the Christmases rolled down towards the tutong to sea like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street. And they stop at the rim of the ice edged fish freezing waves and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.

Matthew Rubery:

Okay. So hopefully now that you're hearing a variety of recordings, you're starting to maybe note some differences in sound quality or difference between having a professional narrator or the author themselves reading these recordings. Onwards to the fourth stage in the audiobooks development, and that is books on tape rather than records. So after Cadman, the next audio publishers faced an even bigger challenge, trying to convince people that you could read a book while driving a car. A company called Books on Tape was founded in 1975, and it was founded by this husband and wife who appear in this image. And the man is a Californian named Duval Hecht, who was stuck in California traffic when the idea came to him. He thought certainly there's got to be a better way to spend this time. And he thought other commuters would also be wanting to occupy their minds in some way.

So he came up with the idea to record books on tape. The company name Books on Tape went on to become one of the world's largest audio publishers. It was the first company to focus exclusively on unabridged recordings of books. So Cadman's records were impressive. We saw the literary lineup they had, but they were almost all on a single record, so they often had to be abridged or abbreviated recordings. People who are stuck in traffic though, they don't want the shortest story possible. They want the longest story possible. They want to fill that time. So the company came up with an idea of providing books on tape through the mail, through the post, so that people could hear these books while they were stuck in traffic.

Here then is an early image showing a man driving with a stack of cassettes next to him, which he would change as he drove and listened to an entire novel. Now, books on tape rented books to America's growing number of drivers. And it was sort of like a book of the month club for audio books. I'm going to put up an image of just the newspaper advertise, one of the small newspaper advertisements that were ubiquitous at this time, trying to sort of encourage people to sign up and have tapes sent to them through the mail. And there were a number of factors sort of making it a good time to start an audiobook business. The growth of the suburbs, lots of long commutes that people were having, especially in California and LA traffic in particular, and also the introduction of tape players that were starting to be put into people's cars.

Here then is an image of a book with its new medium as we switch from records to tape cassettes. And the Australian classic The Thornbirds was one of the most popular recordings at this time, I should point out. So America's drivers formed the bulk of the target audience for books on tape, and the marketing campaign really targeted unhappy drivers who were stuck in traffic. So here's one of the early flyers showing LA gridlock that who would want to be stuck in that traffic. But more importantly, here's one of the first billboards that drivers who were not driving anywhere really would see out their window and think, "Ah, I could be spending this time hearing a great story." The larger challenge of books on tape was to change the reputation of audiobooks though, from a form of entertainment for people with disabilities, as it still had a reputation for being into a form of entertainment for other people as well.

So it was one thing, as I mentioned, for people with vision impairments to listen to books, they had no other choice. But throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the perception persisted that the audience for audiobooks consisted of people who were just too lazy to do the work of reading for themselves. So this company tried to change that perception by saying, "No, audiobooks are for busy people. People are out there accomplishing things and don't have time to sit down and curl up with a good book, but instead need to take advantage of all the free time they have to have books read to them." In addition to these tape cassettes players put into people's cars, the Sony Walkman also did for pedestrians what the car stereo did for drivers. This popular handheld device, and I'm guessing that as we get closer to the present, this will be familiar to some of you.

This device allowed people to listen to tapes wherever they wished. It enabled people to listen to tapes while they were riding a bus or jogging through the park or even while doing chores as the woman in this image advertising what was called the audiobook belt is able to do while hoovering her house. So I want to play another recording now. This is the first recording made by this company. It's of a novel or a popular book of the time by George Plimpton called Paper Line. It was about an American writer trying out for a football team in the position of quarterback. But what stands out to me is I met this founder. I interviewed him and he described how this first recording was made just in his living room with one of his tape players and he hired a student from the nearby university to do the reading for him, an aspiring actor.

So it's kind of the amateurishness that stands out to me in the recording, but it also is part of its charm. See what you think.

Unknown narrator:

I carried the suitcase down to the street and went out to Kennedy Airport to catch an aeroplane to Detroit. From there, I would go by car an hour north to Cranbrook, a boy's private school near Bloomfield Hills, whose athletic facilities were being used by the Detroit Lions for their preseason training. I was going there as the Lions last string quarterback, as my friends referred to it, to join the team as an amateur, to undergo firsthand the life of the professional and hopefully to describe the experience in a book.

Matthew Rubery:

Okay. So it seems like people are kind of figuring out the best way to make these recordings as they go, which brings us to the fifth stage and that's digital audiobooks. So this brings us up more or less to the present moment of digital downloads, an era that many of you will be familiar with. So by the 1990s, audiobooks are no longer kind of a novelty. The spoken word recordings had evolved from a niche product into an established industry by this time, and they even had an official name. It wasn't until 1994 that the industry finally agreed to use the term audiobooks. Before then, everyone used just a different term to refer to audiobooks. They might call them talking books, they might call them recorded books, books on tape, or even other terms. I remember growing up going to bookstores and they all had different labels that would have cassettes or CDs or whatever.

So this is a massive step forward. By the end of the 1990s, nearly all audio publishers had websites. And it might seem obvious today that downloads would be a major part of the audio publishing industry's future, but it wasn't so obvious at the time, mainly because people didn't have anything to listen to these recordings on. So one of the last technological steps in the audiobooks history that I'd like to show you today is the Audible Player. I will put this technology up on the slide, and this was Audible's first portable handheld device on which people could listen to audiobooks. So it could hold up to two hours. You still had to manually plug it into your computer though and put your download onto it. So it's a lot more fiddly than how we download recordings now under our phones. This was the biggest thing to happen to audiobooks since the Walkman.

And although short-lived, it serves as a bridge to more sophisticated devices like MP3 players or the smartphones that we're used to now. Now stepping back from this technology, here's the big ongoing shift that I see. Most of the audiobooks history that I've been talking about has been concerned with trying to be as faithful as possible to the original printed book, but around this time, that publisher stopped caring so much about the printed book. And instead, they start to promote audiobooks as an art form in their own right. One that could do things that printed books can't. So again, making use of celebrity narrators. Here's Kate Winslet reading for part of a popular series. They could use full casts and turn into dramatic performances. They could use sound effects or they could add music. And they were proud of it rather than kind of being sheepish about not sticking closely to the printed book.

Here is an advertisement for the Word of Promises Audio Bible, a production that had over 600 actors. So you can see how the audiobook is moving towards other media. It's practically cinematic now and certainly had the budget of a large Hollywood production.

Many of today's audiobooks are no longer even based on books at all. A book titled The Shapan Manuscript was published as an audiobook in 2007 with no print original. So we've moved from audiobook to just basically audio with no book. Now, I won't play a recording for this section because I'm guessing most people are familiar with what audiobooks sound like today, but I do want to highlight the increasing diversity of narrators today. The recordings we've heard so far are read by a pretty narrow demographic, whereas there's a lot more thought that goes into casting today and trying to match up a narrator with the content of a book. So for instance, the story of a young woman will probably be read by a female narrator today rather than a old middle-aged narrator like we heard in the earlier recordings.

This brings us to the last stage of the audiobook's development, and that is AI generated audiobooks. The final stage brings us to the issue on everyone's mind. The proliferation of AI voices has become one of the most contentious issues in the audiobook industry since new tools now make it possible to generate an entire audiobook from only a few samples of an author's voice. Any of you out there who haven't heard these synthetic voices recently may be startled by how lifelike they sound. We are way past the point of robot sounding voices. The synthetic voices have become so lifelike, in fact, that it is pretty much impossible to distinguish them from human narrators. And the last statistic I saw on this was that 70% of the time people can't distinguish between real and synthetic narrator voices anymore. Major platforms such as Audible and Spotify now offer AI generated narration.

And the Swedish company, Storytell, now offers a voice switcher mode that allows listeners to toggle between human and non-human narrators for the same title. And you may have guessed that the people shown in this slide are not real people, they are AI generated ones. AI is transforming the audiobook industry by producing narration faster and cheaper than any humans are able to do. For this reason, verification labels will become increasingly important in the future as voice cloning continues to blur the line between human and non-human narration.

One has only to look at the case of Edward Herman, an award-winning actor who's narrated books by Stephen King and other major authors. Herman died in the year 2014, so just over a decade ago, but his voice lives on. Thanks to a licencing agreement between the actor's estate and a tech company, which created a digital replica of his voice. So as a result, even though Herman is dead, you can still find new audiobooks credited to him, including this one titled Stalingrad, which carries a label indicating that is digitally narrated using a synthesised voice. And at the bottom it says, narrated by Edward Herman, but then has that parenthetical note saying a male synthesised voice. So hearing a book read by Edward Herman means entirely different things depending on whether the recording was made while the actor was alive or dead.

More worryingly, there are serious risks of voice cloning being used to make deepfake audiobooks. Stephen Fry, popular British actor, discovered that his voice had been cloned from the recordings he made of the Harry Potter books and then used without permission to narrate a film documentary. So he heard this and was rightly freaked out by it. He was hardly exaggerating then when he raised the alarm about more sinister potential uses of AI voices. And in fact, this turned out to happen almost immediately with another actor associated with the Harry Potter franchise. Emma Watson, who many of you will recognise as Hermione, she was the victim not long after Steven Fry's incident, she was the victim of a fake audio clip that depicts her reading excerpts from Hitler's Mein Kampf. So this is totally faked, but who knows how many people were fooled. AI generated voices obviously pose serious risks of deception, and yet some public figures have already started to embrace synthetic voice technology.

So not everyone is being faked here. And Melania Trump's recent memoir offers a noteworthy example. The audiobook version was released using not her own voice, but an AI generated replica trained with her permission on recordings of her voice. The press described Melania Trump's audiobook as the first instance of a living author using an AI generated replica of their own voice to generate their work instead of reading the book themselves or hiring a professional actor to do it for them.

In fact, the book's marketing campaign points towards a future in which hybrid models of narration will blur the distinction between authentic and artificial voices. So I think in the future, even audiobooks read by the author will probably be enhanced or edited in some way by the use of AI. For many listeners, that distinction is already ceasing to matter. What's important is that AI cloning offers new forms of access, connection, and intimacy with otherwise remote public figures like Melania. In the coming years, this technology will allow listeners not only to choose who reads a book, but also how it's read. And with customizable narration, you'll be able to make adjustments to tone, pacing, pitch, and expressiveness to have Melania read your favourite line exactly how you want her to. And the relationship doesn't even have to end when the audiobook does. The tech people I've spoken with predict that audiobooks may soon become interactive, extending the reading experience through conversations with a chatbot.

This means that you'll be able to ask Melania all the questions you've ever wanted to about her fairytale romance with the American president. I will play you a little clip from Melania's audiobook for those of you who haven't yet read it, and you can hear what it sounds like.

Melania Trump, narrator:

"Prepare for landing, "the pilot announced. I pressed the off button on my Walkman and gazed out the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of New York City in the distance. My heart pounded with excitement. I was 26 years old, and while I had travelled everywhere in Europe, I had never been on a journey quite like this. This was America, New York, a different world all together. I had made the decision to test my skills in the American modelling market carefully after weighing all the professional and personal implications. There were risks, yes, but buoyed by an internal sense of confidence and the ongoing support of my family, I was certain I could succeed. The potential rewards would outweigh the uncertainties.

Matthew Rubery:

Okay. I don't know how great an example of AI voices that is, but that is exactly how Melania sounds. So take my word for it there. I'll finish up with a few brief thoughts then about what I've covered. There's been a lot of excitement in recent years about audiobooks, and you often hear talk about the 21st century's audiobook revolution. The point I've been making is that audiobooks have always been in a state of revolution. We've looked at six key stages in the audiobook's development, and you've heard samples showing how the sound of these recordings has changed over the last century. And you've also had a glimpse of how questions about the legitimacy of audiobooks that many people are still debating today are practically as old as sound recording technology itself. I see the same pattern at work throughout this history. The emphasis in the word audiobook can either be on audio or on book.

From Thomas Edison's original prediction that people would use sound recording technology to listen to recorded books, all the way up to today's AI generated voices, audiobooks have continually challenged our understanding of what it means to read a book, and they will continue to do so as we head towards the future in which many audiobook narrators are no longer human at all. So thank you for listening to my 100% human voice, no AI here. I'd be happy to take any questions or discuss these matters further. Thank you very much.

Luke Hickey:

We've got a shy audience. We've got a shy audience tonight. We do have some microphones if people have got questions, question down the front there. The microphone will come to you so that we can hear it for everyone who's online question there and then a question up here.

Audience member:

Hello. Thank you so much. That was absolutely fascinating. I'm just wondering if you've studied the kind of opposite effect where you have an audio drama, like for example, Douglas Adams, that has become a more like been turned into a written book rather than gone the other way from written to audio?

Matthew Rubery:

Yeah. Great question. In the early days of the audiobooks, before they sort of had their big boom, the Guardian newspaper in Britain had a poll for the country's favourite audiobook and the winner was Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was amusing to those of us who work on audiobooks because as you've suggested, it's not actually an audiobook, right? It's an audio drama and a book that a radio programme that had been adapted and stuff. So it does highlight kind of this fluidity as storytelling moves across different media. I think there's really fuzzy boundaries with audiobooks and other forms of entertainment. So where precisely is the line between an audiobook and a radio drama, right? At what point have you added enough music or enough cast members that it turns into something else altogether? I think radio drama is equally entertaining to listen to, so I'm not too bothered about where that line is, but I do notice just that audiobooks, the closer we get to the present, the more they are blurring into other forms of entertainment in ways that are exciting, but also kind of at some point, I think it leaves the book behind.

Tom Worthington, audience member:

Tom Worthington from computing at the ANU. Have you looked at the educational uses of audio books? As a enthusiast for online education, I looked at going back into where you used to get sent audio cassettes as a form of literature. And I think it was William Burroughs wrote a novel, The Hippos Boiled In Their Tanks, which said how in the future education would be revolutionised and socialised and all be available in your audio format.

Matthew Rubery:

So I think a lot of these early technologies were definitely overhyped. It has not transformed education, but I do think there's huge educational benefits that I think we appreciate much more now. I thought you were going to go in a slightly different direction at first that we're much more sensitive to neurodiversity today. So I just have talked to countless young people with dyslexia who are completely put off print, but find audiobooks really engaging. So to me, that's another great sort of example of how audiobooks can invite new readers in almost as a gateway drug and really engage young people in schools with these narratives that they would otherwise just tune out completely. While researching the history though, I came across all sorts of utopian promises for this technology. So one of the early ones is just by putting an audiobook beneath your pillow and you could learn a foreign language just while sleeping, right?

If only foreign languages were so easy to learn. So they have not really transformed education other than being a additional resource for people who struggle with conventional forms of literacy, but maybe more could be done in the Burroughs line.

Audience member:

Hi, thanks very much for your presentation. I really enjoyed that. I recall just recently there's the Sydney Morning Herald, I think Jason Steigers, his name, the literary journalist, put out a newsletter that he does each week talking about audio books. And he had been part of an ABC, our TV public television network here in Australia. I think they called it the book club, a show every week where they got people in reviewing books, well-known people. And he was referring to an episode from about a decade ago where a British author and an American author were both there. Actually, he might've been Canadian. Sorry, the accent might've foiled me there. But anyway, they were going to head to head about a particular book they'd read and the American/Canadian author admitted to having to listen to the book and then got absolutely slammed for having listened to the book and said, "Well, you didn't actually read the book.

You didn't take in the content. Your comprehension must be out because you did that. " And it was a really interesting insight to, well, in my mind in this day and age, snobbery, literary snobbery. And of course, the statistics these days are showing that audio books are outselling other forms of ebooks and the like.

Is there any data? Is there any proof that someone reading a book as opposed to listening to a book has better comprehension or is superior in some way?

Matthew Rubery:

There is not enough data. I mean, we have audiobook scholars. Millie is one of the leading scholars collecting data like this that we definitely need to sort of answer these questions with precision. You're absolutely right though that that snobbery is very real and a lot of discussions of audiobooks immediately get bogged down in this debate over whether listening to a book counts as real reading. I've seen a real sea change in attitudes though, particularly among young people who a lot of older readers want to protect the printed book. And audiobooks seemed kind of a threat for many years to the printed book. But I think that has changed now that there are so many other threats to reading that audiobooks almost seem like an ally, a way to maintain contact with printed books, or as I put it earlier, a gateway perhaps to get young people excited about books.

So I think I do see a change that has given me hope there. There are occasional studies that look at how efficient are audiobooks compared to print. And the differences are very marginal. The way I think about it though is that we've been perfecting our habits of print reading for 500 years. Audio books are relatively young and new. So I think as they become more normalised, so will our reading patterns, and there will be no difference in terms of let's say retention of the plot or things like that. And we often kind of compare apples to oranges and compare kind of very casual audiobook listening. I mean, there are times when I'm listening while riding a bike or something like that. I'm definitely not giving it my full attention, but the blind readers I've spoken to, they are just reading with absolute concentration. So I think that is a choice.

And I think the more we listen to these books, the more people will be giving it full attention or be aware of these differences. There are just isolated studies though doing like brain studies or things like that. And I would love to see more of that work being done so we can finally answer this question once and for all.

Audience member:

So when you mentioned one of the uses of AI leading into people being able to respond to their audio books, it made me think of one book format where readers do actively respond, which is choose your own adventures. So far, have you seen anyone be bold enough to attempt an audio version of a choose your own adventure or have we just not gotten there yet?

Matthew Rubery:

I'm trying to think if there are specific examples of that. It's something that should be technologically easy to do, but it almost continues on from what I was saying a moment ago that because this format is still relatively new, some of the basic tools for reading print are just not available yet. So indexes, for instance, is something that really is not often available for sound. So you can read a book and then turn to the index to find something you want. That's not very easy with audiobooks, but blind people, I mean, again, back in the 40s and 50s, they did develop tonal indexes, so you could sort of find something through different sounds. So it's definitely available or possible. There just has to be the will to do it. Audiobooks are very expensive to make because they still have to pay the same price as the print book, but on top of that, you have to add the labour costs of recording the books, hiring an actor, possibly an editor as well, studio time and all that.

And so it's always a small profit industry. And my guess is that would be the obstacle on a case like that, that yes, it'd be innovative and fun, but it would also be almost a promotional gimmick until it was a viable business model. AI might open up possibilities though because it would remove a lot of those labour costs. I didn't really mention this, but some of the positive uses of AI is the vast majority of print books are never turned into audiobooks. I think it's something like 10% are actually recorded. So for all those books, it will be great to have a cheap, possibly free version available for books that otherwise wouldn't reach a listening audience.

Luke Hickey:

All right. Matt, thank you so much for tonight. If the saying about you need to learn something new every day today, I certainly have that ingenuity of the early inventors. Hearing some of those voices as a place that has lots of oral histories of people's voices from the past, did bring chills that couldn't just be attributed to the outside weather as well. And the quality difference in the first recital and the latest recital that you played maybe is only marginal. But I think that interesting, getting people involved, in reading, no matter what the form is something that we're all really passionate about and is so important and where some of those great questions were heading as well was really great to hear. While we were taking questions, the Edison phonograph did get me interested in having a look in Trove to see what the earliest mention is of that.

And there are articles from around that time talking about what had been played in the astonishment. So you can only imagine what people reading without having heard that yet would have been thinking for the same time as well. So we'll share some of those with you too. Thank you to everyone in the audience. Thanks for your participation and your great questions as well tonight for that curiosity and your willingness to come out on a chilly night to explore and hear how technology does continue to reshape the ways in which we experience these great things. Invite all lovers of great stories to join us for the upcoming Canberra Writers Festival events that we've got on here at the National Library. Those events and that partnership does extend beyond just the festival, which is in October, but does give a great chance to hear from some really remarkable writers dive into big ideas like tonight and celebrate the joy of storytelling.

So you can have a look at our What's On page, which is on the website and a couple of author talks we've got coming up soon, Lisa Wilkinson and Rosalie Ham, which are on the 30th of April and the 1st of May. We hope to see you back here for more of those conversations that do inspire, challenge and delight. I'm going to go home and see if I can dust off my choose your own adventure story collection from the past as well. But please join me in thanking Millie and the ANU for helping to put on tonight's event and for bringing Matthew to town and to Matt for sharing your experience and your stories. Thank you so much.