Technology in the world is advancing faster than ever. Self-driving cars, robotics, even a smart ring. It’s out with the old and in with the new, but some old things like to have a tendency of preserving the way they are done.

Image from Good e-Reader

Books are one of those things. Reading has shifted over the years to digital, of course, e-books became popular in the 2000s to readers who wanted to have many books without needing lots of space for storage. Of course, there were always those who preferred the hard copy.

Technology took reading a step further. Well, not really reading, but books. Audiobooks became huge to anyone who wanted to get through a book without actually having to sit down to manually read it. The first audiobooks came out way back in 1932, they came in the form of a recording studio by The American Foundation for the Blind. They started becoming more widely used in the 1960s and 1980s when cassette tapes and compact discs became more readily available. By 1994 the term “audiobook” was an industry standard.

Image from Voices.com

In the year 2000, Amazon’s Audible released the first portable audio player that was designed for audiobooks. The upgrades came with the years and now listeners can have hundreds of hours from their smartphones with more than 35,000 books to choose from.

In 2016, the Audio Publishers Association revealed that audiobook sales came out to $2.1 billion, beating out the $1.8 billion of hardcover copy books by around $3 million. In 2020, audiobook sales reached $3.3 billion, and the industry is only growing.

Many readers may look down on audiobooks, saying it’s not really reading. Listeners say audiobooks help them focus and pick up more of the book, allowing them to get through more novels. So what’s your side, will you be reading or listening to your next book?