WISH YOU WERE HEAR

We take a look at the rising star in the arts and entertainment firmament that can magically beam us to far distant places with little more than a whisper …AUDIO BOOKS

So I’m watching a streamed Canadian legal series, which is very well written, directed and performed, but it’s the city of Vancouver, where the series is set, which frequently upstages the dramatic action and steals the scene.  I’ve only visited Vancouver for forty minutes, racing between terminals, at the dead of night to catch a connection to Seattle, but now that city, perched between my two favourite terrains, mountains and beaches, is continually beckoning from somewhere deep in my brainbox.

Roughly five thousand miles east of Vancouver, the city of York has recently provided the backdrop for an excellent police procedural featuring an autistic records officer. And here, once again, the stunning visuals of the city actively compete with the action shot after shot.

I worked for a York-based company for over thirteen years, and so have the additional frisson of spotting familiar streets, landmarks, pubs and bars, and, as with Vancouver, the city now calls to me again.

This kind of long-distance connection must have been familiar to Roman citizens scattered across an empire covering two million square miles, which was roughly the size of the Roman Empire when Constantine The Great was proclaimed Emperor on July 25^th 306 AD …in York.  Indeed, to the majority of Romans, the mother city might just as easily have been located in Canada (if the Roman Navy had got its act together) because Rome was more a state of mind than a geographical location, as Constantine would later prove, 24 years later, by moving the centre of Empire nine hundred miles East to Constantinople, previously known as Byzantium and now known as Istanbul.

At the time of the relocation, the population of the Roman Empire is estimated as being between 50 and 70 million.

This year, 338 million people are forecast to ‘relocate’ the centre of their empires, i.e. their attention, to cities and villages, mountains and beaches, all over the planet (and across the Universe) by listening to audiobooks.

And while this is obviously just a temporary relocation (unless you get axed mid-chapter of Kerouac’s On The Road while crossing the road) currently around fifty-five percent of listeners are believed to spend between one and four hours a week ‘somewhere else,’ with a third spending between five and ten hours.

Currently the audiobook sector remains dwarfed by other chapters of The Business of Pleasure (in 2024 global audiobooks accounted for $8.7 billion revenue c.f. global cinema box office of $28.1 billion) but growth is astonishingly strong, with that $ 8.7 billion forecast to rise to $35 billion annually by 2030.

Rachel Reeves please take note.

And as someone who, as a young child, suffered the daily humiliations of undiagnosed dyslexia (the UK government refusing to recognise the condition until the mid 1980s) my heart goes out to a piece of research conducted by one forward-thinking primary school* which, when looking into how audiobooks can assist pupils in text-based learning, concluded:

‘…It is clear that whilst more comprehensive studies are necessary in order to conclusively prove the benefits of audiobooks in the development of written comprehension for children, some more general conclusions can almost certainly be drawn from the series of sessions organised for the purposes of this project.  They can be subdivided into the following three categories:

Behavioural impact:

Turning reading into a multi-sensory activity has self-evident and immediate positive implications on the behaviour of pupils.  Focus is significantly enhanced, children are less prone to external distractions and reading pace is increased.  The impact of ‘silencing’ the outside world to some children – particularly those presenting with behavioural/concentration issues – should not be underestimated.

Impact on comprehension:

The presence of an emotive narrator has been seen to aid children considerably with elements of comprehension, which focus on more complex of inference of a character and their motives as well as a more general ‘situational awareness’ within a narrative. Children are able to pick up cues from tone, pace and expression which they would often miss if reliant entirely on the text. Furthermore, fact retrieval seems to become more efficient when children have had the opportunity to both read and hear a particular piece of information.

Impact and enjoyment:

Perhaps most significantly, there is a clear and obvious enhancement of children’s enjoyment of reading when a narrative or non-fiction text is read to them when they follow along.  Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising. Writing is not particularly old in evolutionary terms; insufficient time in many respects for the evolution of specialised mental processes devoted to reading.  We continue to use the mental mechanism that evolved to understand oral language – through storytelling, conversation, song, poetry and humour – to support the comprehension of written language.  Most children’s earliest positive experiences of literature come from oral storytelling by their parents or carers.  Perhaps, as educators, we underestimate the powerful impact of the human voice and the emotions it conveys in creating vivid and powerful imagery in the minds of our children whilst helping to clarify and infer complex ideas and actions.’

But there’s something more at work here, in my opinion. Audiobooks can relocate ‘us,’ our centre of attention, to far distant places, but it is people who (almost) invariably make those places, the characters and communities with which the author populates their works and with whom we, as listeners, engage -prefering their company, at least temporarily, to their real world counterparts.

There can’t be a city, or region, within the United Kingdom that doesn’t have their equivalent of Oxford’s Morse/Lewis/Endeavour trinity, Yorkshire’s Dalziel and Pascoe or Edinburgh’s Rebus.  

Or a period in our history that some dutiful chronicler hasn't painstakingly reconstructed, in novel form, for us time travellers to visit through the earholes; Mary Stewart (Arthurian) Hilary Mantel (Tudor) Philippa Gregory (Tudor and Plantagenet) Bridgerton (Regency). 

I could go on, but I need to get some shopping in, accompanied today by Aberdeen’s ‘Granite City’ Grampian police force, curtesy of the brilliant Stuart MacBride.

Cheerio the noo!

DT 19^th March 2026

*Can audiobooks, utilised with traditional reading methods, improve comprehension of texts and enhance reading stamina, enjoyment and focus?  Hoxton Garden Primary School, upper Phase.  Viridis Schools Foundation, 2018.