Professor Matthew Rubery discusses the evolution of the Audiobook, exploring the six pivotal phases ofdevelopment, from Analog to AI.

Audiobooks may seem like a recent invention, but their history stretches back nearly 150 years. This lecture traces the audiobook’s development from the first experiments with recorded sound in 1877 to today’s smartphones and AI-generated voices.

Along the way, the lecture shows that many of today’s most pressing questions have been debated for decades: Does listening count as reading? Should narrators perform? Can audiobooks do more than imitate printed ones? Seen in this perspective, the disruption caused by AI is merely the latest episode in an ongoing story of technological innovation and changing ideas about what it means to read.