Library

It's still in my ear, Hans Paetsch's voice. Spellbound, we children sat by the record player and pinned our ears back as he told us in his warm, sonorous baritone the tales of Sleeping Beauty, Little Mook or the Little Match Girl. Cozy memories of an age when radio plays and readings on records, tapes or the radio were strictly for kids, near-sighted oldtimers and radio freaks.

The genre has long since established itself and now offers such a vast assortment that even experts can hardly keep track of the new releases, with everything from complete Bible readings to audio porn. So it can't be for want of variety that the silver discs don't grab me – despite my fond memories of the "fairy-tale uncle of the nation" who used to whisk me away to faraway worlds. And yet I was all ears for the sales pitch of audio book proponents. "Double your time," for example: free time's lost time if it isn't put to good use. The same goes for our auditory organ, of course, when left woefully idle, e.g. when ironing, cooking or shaving. All activities that don't really tax our brains – and that includes driving – are preordained for a snatch of literature from the CD player. For, as the constant din of the radio supposedly goes to show, we can almost always listen.

Not so, though. Sure, every reader probably gets the gist of Schätzing's The Swarm, even if they skim or even skip a page or two. But really getting into a work of literature is something else entirely. Then the audio book becomes more than just a sound installation to fill the acoustic void while ironing your shirts. Listening demands concentration. And concentration demands time – probably modern man's most precious good. We all know what's it like when those precious few hours of free time after work or on the weekend melt away at a heartrending clip. That new Swedish detective novel, the bulging weekend paper, the biography on the bedside table – still lying there gathering dust.

And now there's the big audio book gift-pack I got for my last birthday: Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, read by the inimitable Gert Westphal. 15 CDs, total play time 1170 minutes. I didn't have enough spare time, now all the nice new books are simply out of luck and will have to wait another few weeks for me to get round to them. Or maybe I enjoy the listening experience so much that I decide to forgo the more strenuous activity of reading books altogether. Headphones on, eyes shut and off to another world that captivates, lulls me…and puts me to sleep.

That's liable to breed scepticism about the big hopes pinned to the audio book: might it be a means to lure book-shy teenagers to literature? The audio book as a prelude and gateway drug to "real" books? Although a study by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association shows that audio books are becoming more and more popular with pre-teens and teens, book-reading still ranks with the "also-rans" as far as their preferred pastimes go. Not even rapper Sabrina Setlur, who has recorded some Kafka texts for a CD production, will succeed in convincing literary teetotallers to reach for a book. On the contrary. The trend toward the shiny silver disc promotes a different mindset, the same that is manifest in Internet surfing, e-mails and SMS: it's the spread of "byte-sized" culture, which is ousting the use and comprehension of demanding texts. The more popular audio books become with kids and teenagers, as well as adults, for that matter, the harder things will be for printed books.

Nowadays many a new publication is released in sync with a parallel audio version. And the trend toward MP3 audio book downloading via Internet portals like audible.de or claudio.de is only just beginning. It only takes a few seconds to download the latest Grisham thriller onto your PC thanks to state-of-the-art broadband technology. Which leaves your local bookseller out in the cold. The publishing industry still has great expectations for the audio book. As a matter of fact, it's the only segment regularly reporting two-digit growth rates in a market that has been shrinking or stagnating on the whole for years now. But an end to the boom is already in the offing: the growth curve is gradually levelling off, the market's showing the first signs of saturation. The audio book has established itself as a genre in its own right and has conquered a small but stable market share. As a separate art form it woos consumers the same way DVDs, the cinema and theatre do. And the audio book benefits from the fact that the public is often not necessarily too lazy for literature, just too lazy to sit down and read. And that's the really bad news for books.