Listen to This

All writers know that inspiration will strike in unlikely places. I, for instance, was buying birthday cards when it occurred to me how to save the publishing business.

Three of my family members have birthdays within a week of each other, so I was tooling around the local card store, trying to find semi-witty greetings with that soupçon of offensiveness that my family has come to expect. 

If you’ve been to a Hallmark shop of late, you’ll know that boring, plain cards are so, well, 1990s. The kind that simply have art on the outside and a message on the inside. No, today’s hip cards have sound. Open such a card, and you’ll hear a few bars from a popular song or a skien of dialog from a movie or TV show.

For instance, you can get birthday card in which you hear Steve Carrell scream from the chest-waxing scene in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" or a card that plays Napoleon Dynamite muttering an incomprehensible koan. There’s a card celebrating an anniversary that plays Dan Ackroyd’s classic "Bassomatic" routine from Saturday Night Live. Or you can get a card for a terminally ill person that plays, "Don’t Worry, Be Happy."

As the other patrons tested each card, the store sounded similar to a dorm hallway in which eight different stereos were playing eight different genres of music. But it was in this cacophony that I realized what publishers have been lacking all these years, what will get the "public" back in the "reading public":

Sound. Books with sound. 

Before you dismiss this as a crackpot notion from a man whose other brilliant ideas included a Pac-Man novel, a combat robot named Harmpit, and a story based on spam (the e-mail, not the food), hear me out. The conventional wisdom is that fewer Americans read because decades of television has rotted our attention spans. With video games and the Internet, it’s just gotten worse. The non-reading public wants something to engage its senses that isn’t too mentally taxing (like reading) yet is still gratifying.

Abandon all hope, he who open here

That’s where Books With Sound can bridge the gap. Say you’re reading a Jonathan Franzen snoozefest after hearing about the book on "Oprah," and just as you rue the hour in which you spent $29.99, you turn the page and hear James Earl Jones intone, "Luke, I am your father!"

Or  imagine you’re reading, I dunno, "Pray, Love, Eat," which, if my eyes tell the truth, is being read primarily by women. Perhaps a page ends with the word "food," and when you turn the page, John Belushi’s voice screams out, "Food fight!"  If the publisher is desperate, they can have a page following one that ends with "eat" have a porn star scream something rather salacious, shall we say. Crass, anti-intellectual, mysogynist, yes. But think of all the guys who would buy the book! 

Now, now, I can hear the naysayers out there. I didn’t buy a book to get spoken to — if I wanted that, I would have bought one of those newfangled "books on tape." I want the book to exist in my own thoughts! I don’t want some fratboy yelling at me when I’m enjoying the subtle pleasures of the mind!

Read all about it

But you miss the point, dear reader. Books are no longer "mere words." Novels are no longer just maps of the writer’s imagination. There are books based on movies based on books. Books based on video games. Books with advertising, books with product placements. There are books on electronic readers like the Kindle, and it’s only a manner of time before books are supplemented with video streams — who needs to read a boring, text-heavy scene when we can show it to you! Especially with kick-ass fights and explosions!

For trust me when I say this: in 20 or 30 years, books as we know them now will cease to exist. Books With Sound is a simple, cost-effective way to "bridge the gap" between the old-fashioned, archaic, antiquated technology of paper and words and the Brave New World when we won’t need words at all! This way, those publishers and editors can work another few decades before being replaced by someone in Bangalore or a computer program.

Don’t fret the end of the existing order. After all, look what you have look forward to hearing.