Audible Speaks

Don Katz of Audible.com posts an eloquent defense of books-on-tape and their ilk:

When I started Audible -- much more so than now -- I was often asked to defend my belief in the intellectual integrity of literate listening as opposed to consuming words as text... [snip]

I would counter by saying that my writing mentor, the novelist Ralph Ellison, taught me that the character of American literature was a direct result of American talking - our campfire story-telling, Yankee peddlers calling out the jazz of the sales, our loud heritage of boasting and our jokes. I would note that Plato and Socrates were dead set against the upstart technology of text because they said it would atrophy creative thinking and memory, and that through the time of Augustine, good Christians only read out loud. Text, from its 13th century paper variation to print 200 years later, and on to print's heyday in the 19th and part of the early 20th century, was at root a technological reaction to the distribution problems posed by a desire to get the wise man's words from village to village.

Well worth a click-through. « via Scripting News »