AS A CHILD, I squeezed extra hours of reading from each day by switching on the tape deck after lights out. I didn't like surrendering my active mind to sleep, but I could let unconsciousness catch me unawares. Decades later, driven to desperation by insomnia, I unearthed old cassette tapes from my childhood bedroom and discovered that their comforts still worked on me. So I did the only logical thing and subscribed to Audible, the Amazon subsidiary with a near-monopoly on digital audiobooks, and before long I was catching up on contemporary fiction while I swiffered my floors every Sunday, speeding through classics while my dog decided where to pee. It's a little embarrassing to admit how much this habit has come to mean to me. I'm sleeping better, but it's not only that. The precise elocution of the practiced actor-narrators is often the only human speech I hear all day. I was lonelier than I realized before it entered my routine.
If I'd become a journalist in another era, before Facebook and Google came along to claim around 70 percent of the digital advertising that once supported my industry, I might have held a full-time job and spent my days surrounded by people. (I've been lucky enough to experience this a couple of times, at publications that abruptly imploded; since then, I've rationalized permalancing as a comparatively stable alternative.) It's simplistic but not entirely inaccurate to say that Audible's parent, Amazon, is to book publishing what Facebook and Google are to magazines: the troll under the bridge whose idea of a toll is to devour consumers and competitors whole. Amazon already accounts for around half of all print book sales and more than 80 percent of ebook sales, and has recently thrown its weight into publishing its own books and giving them top billing in its online marketplace, eating ever deeper into traditional publishers' profits. “They aren't gaming the system,” a literary agent told the Wall Street Journal this winter. “They own the system.”
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