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Speaker 1Not only are books being destroyed to train it, but artificial intelligence is turning up in writing, reviewing and literary prizes. The publishing world has been forced to rethink what makes a book, a review or an author genuinely human. So what happens to books? When technology starts changing every part of that experience. What might e-reader screens and audiobooks be doing to our brains, good and bad? And how do book talk, book clubs and human recommendations help us navigate a world with almost too many books to choose from? My name is Rae Johnston and welcome to Download This Show on ABC Radio National. Now joining me to unpack the impact that technology is having on books, the way they're written, the way we read them, Anna Berkey, CEO of Australia Reads. Welcome to Download This Show. It's great to be here. Thank you, Rae. And Bec Kavanagh, Senior Tutor in Creative Writing and Publishing at the University of Melbourne. Thanks for having me. Now, technology has given us e-books, audiobooks, phones, tablets, captions. The old idea of sitting down with a paper-based book is now just one option in a much larger reading buffet, you could say. The experiences of them all feel a little bit different. But are they in any kind of meaningful way? Is technology changing the way we read, Anna?
Speaker 3I think it's certainly having an impact. Print is far and away still the king of books. Most people use. Read a print book. They also prefer to read a print book across all different age groups, including our teenagers. So that's quite heartening. But I think those other options that are coming in, whether that's e-books, whether that's audiobooks, just give us different options. And when it comes to sort of the benefits that we get from those different options, whenever we look at the reading studies about the many benefits of reading, we do get the most benefit from reading print books. We retain the information better. The tactile nature of it gives us triggers that help us to remember things. But e-books and audiobooks are right there as well because you are still getting the complexity of the written word read aloud to you. And you're still getting many of the literacy benefits as well as the social and well-being benefits that come from books. So there's some slight differences, but they are all still really valuable.
Speaker 1Do we know this for a fact that reading from a printed paper book. we retain the information better?
Speaker 3Yes, there have been a couple of studies. And it's still a pretty emerging field for the researchers because this technology hasn't actually been around for all that long. So longitudinal studies, we're expecting more of those to come over the next few years. But there is documented evidence from universities like the University of Oxford that does show that we don't retain things as well if we have read it on a screen as if we have read it on print. And that. And there are still benefits for the different kinds of reading. But there'll be some quite fascinating information to come over the years as we get to grips with what this technology really is doing to our brains.
Speaker 1Absolutely. And what does listening to an audiobook give us that reading from a screen or a page doesn't? Do we know?
Speaker 3Well, I think the way that we're starting to hear audiobooks be produced is changing. So you've got lots of different options and styles. So some of them are like this. They're just. One voice or two or three voices. It might be the author themselves who's reading the book, which is often really interesting when you're reading some form of memoir or autobiography. To hear it in a person's own words can be quite striking and a bit of a different experience. But also we're seeing books that are more like multicast radio plays. So a little while back, Shang-Lu's Whitewash won the Abia Audiobook of the Year. And it had a cast, I think, of 21. Which is huge for an audiobook narration. So we're seeing all of these different styles pop up. And I think we're going to see more variation and experimentation over the years to come in audiobook formats to give us different emotions, different nuance, different point of view from different characters. It reminds me of the old school radio plays in a way. Very much so. It's nice to see a resurgence really for that.
Speaker 1I'm curious as to what technology is doing. To our attention spans. It's something that we've looked at with social media. But have we seen that mirrored in e-books or audiobooks? Are we able to concentrate as long as
Speaker 3if we've got a paper book? That's part of the difficulty. I think with technology, there are some wins for books. I think being able to read an e-book in the middle of the night without having to wake up your entire household is a real advantage. But when we look at what the digital technology in particular, endless scroll and particularly social media have provided to us, they have fragmented our attention spans. Concentration is proven to be more difficult. There's constantly notifications pinging. It's very easy to get distracted. And that's something that is not the fault of the screen necessarily, but is what the systems of those notifications and distraction that are on there. That it has become increasingly the case that it's difficult to concentrate for long periods of time. And for people who are still, who take a little bit of time to get into books, to get into that flow state where you forget that you're actually reading and you're sort of watching a movie in your brain, that can get more difficult to achieve because we are too used to being distracted and interrupted. So I think that that's a real downside of the way the modern world is operating.
Speaker 1Bec, from your experience as a tutor, working with students who are, in the creative writing field, are they considering these alternative, technologically based platforms when they're writing books? Are they thinking, oh, I better write this a little bit differently because it's going to be narrated as an audio book or it's going to be on a screen where I'm going to be fighting for concentration spans?
Speaker 4Look, I don't know that it's necessarily coming into the student mindset in that active way, but certainly, they're all engaging with text on screen a lot more. I mean, the hill that I will die on is that the university reader for subjects is no longer available in print and is only available online. And so that changes the way they actually come to class and engage with the information that we're presenting. In terms of thinking about how it changes their own writing, it's not something that comes up a lot in conversations in my class, but I do quite a lot of freelance writing and I have certainly experienced a shift in editorial priorities towards shorter works with that understanding of either fragmented attention spans due to following hyperlinks. For example, we're used to reading in chunks and pieces rather than long form. But also, you know, the kind of second screen effect. We sort of assume that people are doing multiple things at once. And it's funny that Anna mentioned flow state because I was listening to a cycle psychology podcast recently about flow state and the guest speaker was talking about the way that multitasking actually increases our stress levels. So that multitasking of having, you know, two screens or yes, something in front of us on screen plus a physical book. And what we obviously want to achieve when we're reading is flow state. And so for me, you know, audio books are actually a way of achieving that flow state sometimes. So yeah, I think technology is both shortening our attention spans in and out of the classroom, but also providing some of the solutions to getting them back again.
Speaker 1Yeah, when you're speaking about second screening there, it just reminds me of Netflix's new policies with commissioning films that are more simplistic and repeated. Because the assumption is that people will have a phone in their hand at the same time as they're watching a movie. It's kind of depressing to think about.
Speaker 4It is, but you know, it's so funny that we're talking about radio plays because effectively, that's what we're turning the screen into, right? You know, we're assuming that people aren't watching what's happening on the screen, that they're just listening to it. You're so right. Yeah, so it's a really weird kind of snake chasing its tail effect in some ways.
Speaker 1It is, but it's not all bad though, I must say. I would love to hear about how you've both seen technology maybe making reading a little bit more accessible, bringing new people into reading. where have you seen that?
Speaker 4Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of research that's come through Australia Reads about this, about, you know, reading identities. And I'll let Anna talk more about that. But one of the things that technology is doing, I think, is bringing in people who historically have not seen themselves as book people. And I think it's really interesting that we're kind of talking about technology specifically related to the book, like e-books and audio books, whereas, you know, for a lot of kids, for example, I have a 13-year-old son and his primary way of engaging with stories is absolutely through gaming. And the way that he then discovers those kind of narratives in print form is through graphic novels, both of which have historically been really kind of dismissed as not proper reading. And I say that with invisible air quotes here. Of course. And so I think that, you know, embracing a wider spectrum of what it means to be a reader and what it means to engage with reading, which includes reading via technology, is only a good thing because it enables not only the readers to continue finding their niche or the people who have always seen themselves as readers to continue finding their niche, but it brings other people who previously missed it. And so I think that's a really good point.
Speaker 1I think that's a
Speaker 3really good point. And I think that's a really good point. So we expect a lot more audiobooks. And I love that fact that, building on what Bec was saying, that this allows people, more people to think of themselves as a reader because they have more opportunities in their daily life to build reading in and that they can have those conversations and that social experience as well as the consumption of the actual book itself.
Speaker 4It makes it a mix of both things rather than being one or the other. For example, I'll often have an audiobook version of a book on the go as well as a physical copy. I do that too. Yeah. And I know anecdotally, a lot of people do, right? So, you know, we're actually doing things as a shared experience between tech and physical, not necessarily choosing tech over physical.
Speaker 3And the tech is changing as well. Sorry, Rae. No, that's okay. The tech is expanding and that we're starting to see products appear that are designed for you to read along on the print page while listening, particularly for younger readers. And I think we're going to see more of this kind of product start.
Speaker 1That's so interesting because I just had a memory of when I was a child, one of the ways that I did learn how to read is I had a book with a tape and you put the tape in the cassette player. And when you heard the chimes ring, it was time to turn the page. And you followed along with the narrator on the words. And we're seeing a resurgence of that. That's coming back.
Speaker 3Yeah. As soon as you said the chimes, I just had a flashback to that happening in my own life as
Speaker 1well. Yeah. Oh, that's wonderful. Oh, how joyful. You are listening to Download the Show on ABC Radio National. Rae Johnston here with you. And there has never been more information about books available to us, which sounds wonderful until you open up an app and discover there are approximately 11 million books you could be reading. So how is technology changing how we discover books, Anna?
Speaker 3I find this topic completely fascinating because the overwhelm is so real and it's hard enough when you're sometimes in a bookshop or a library and you're looking at all those beautiful shelves and all those gorgeous covers and the spines and what's facing outwards. And I'm a pretty adept reader. I read a lot. I've always read a lot. So I can very quickly assess what's going on on that bookshelf and work out which ones are for me and which ones, that's a horror book. That's not my genre. I'm not going to look, spend any time looking there. So my brain is doing this really quick filtering process. But that's already challenging enough for me as a regular reader when there's so many beautiful books on those bookshelves. Once we take that into the online space and I'm looking at eBooks or I'm going to buy a book from an online site, that's like, it's like you say, $11 billion. It's completely overwhelming. And that's where curation really has to come in. But the way that we're starting to search for things across the web, not just in books, is to ask a totally different kind of question. Instead of searching for, I'm looking for romance books, I'm starting to ask questions of search engines that say things like, I'm looking for a book about sexy dragons from my mom that she can read in public that has baking in it. And that we're starting to get these real kind of humanistic style questions that where people are asking how to find books. And now that's something that booksellers and librarians are fantastic at. If you go in and talk to a human, they can really unpick that with you. They can find you many great options very remarkably quickly. But if you're doing that online, the industry needs to have the structure behind that in the metadata to be able to facilitate that kind of search. And that's something that's in progress, but things are moving so fast, it's difficult to keep up. So it's really fascinating looking at the way that people are starting to discover books through completely different outlets because they're using this different style of research. And I think that's really important. trying to curate their own way through the maelstrom.
Speaker 1Yeah. Bec, how have you seen online communities changing what we read? I'm thinking about places like BookTok and Bookstagram, these online spaces.
Speaker 4Yeah. I mean, I don't think it's necessarily changing the way that we discover books necessarily. It's just shifted those peer groups to online. So research for a long time has shown that the number one way teens, for example, who's which book they're going to read next is via peer recommendation. And so what we're finding now is that, of course, increasingly people are finding those book peers in online spaces like Bookstagram and BookTok, et cetera. So there's a real kind of niche community there where people feel able to share their love of books, to be book nerds, book fans, recommend books, discover books. And I think that's really wonderful. The flip side of that, of course, is the way that these social media platforms are dictated by the algorithms. And so there is also research that shows the kind of skew towards particular types of books or writers and the exclusion of particular types of books and writers in exactly the kind of, yeah, white heteronormative ways that you might imagine the algorithm skews. So, you know, it's, it's become a place of, of finding community, but I also think we need to be kind of critically aware of how that community is still shaped by the algorithms of social media platforms. I
Speaker 1think about platforms like Goodreads as well, where, you know, ultimately it's a platform where you can log all of the books that you're reading, track your progress, but they also have these seasonal challenges where you need to read books from all of these different categories. And so I think that's, I think that's a really, really important part of this. And I'm wondering how much influence the books that are chosen for those categories has on the popularity of certain authors and genres and what people ultimately decide is worth reading.
Speaker 3It's very much, I mean, the, the, the online algorithms are incredibly powerful because they just, they start to become self-referential and then they're appearing in these other kinds of searches. They're not just maintained on that one platform. If there is a popularity, that's, that's, that's a very, very important thing. And so I think that that's going to then be reflected in the search results. That's going to flow out onto other platforms. And that's where we see this smaller number of books, which are often American titles, um, starting to, to become seen again and again and again. And then people are another way that people navigate through book choice is that they predominantly choose an author that they've read before and enjoyed. So they're immediately then looking for the next ones from that author that have come through that recommendation system. So the power isn't just in the one book, it's that in that the power is then transferred over to all of that author's, um, back catalogue of work, um, which can be amazing for a number of, of authors. Um, but to Beck's point about what gets shown, um, there's a lot of conversation in this country, for example, about Australian stories and how hard it is to surface local stories that reflect the lives of people living in Australia. Um, because this smaller number of books is being kind of, uh, washed through the and again and again.
Speaker 1I see in other places, where our media has gone completely digital. So say I'm thinking music, for instance, ends up being in these subscription services and there's a backlash to that with people who are choosing to collect vinyl and collect CDs. And I'm wondering if book recommendations somehow fit into that, where there is maybe a bit of a rebellion against online recommendations, algorithms, feeds, these curated lists. Are human recommendations, in-person book clubs, recommendations from your local bookstore, are they becoming more and more important?
Speaker 4I think they've always been important. I mean, I started in the industry as a bookseller and I've worked across quite commercial bookstores and really independent bookstores. And I've seen firsthand how, you know, hand-selling, which is the recommendations that independent booksellers make to customers, can completely transform the way that they're selling their books. The life of a book. So I don't know that it's happening as a resistance to technology as such, as much as it's always been so vital to discover books loved by humans outside of those recommended by kind of popular platforms, now algorithms, previously, you know, newspapers or big publicity campaigns or whatever. Like Oprah's book club. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that hand-selling and bookseller relationship has always been really vital. What I do see is more and more booksellers kind of using the knowledge of the influence of the algorithm to their advantage and being able to use that as almost a bit of a translation cue between them and the customer to say, okay, well, this is what's been trending on BookTok. This is what you loved. Why don't you try this, this, and this, which I really loved for these reasons. So they're actually like leveraging the stuff that the algorithm has put in front of people and the popularity of that stuff to bring people back into that relationship with bookshops and booksellers.
Speaker 1If someone's trying to develop their own taste, their reading taste, you know, curate what it is that they genuinely really like, not just get swept away with whatever's popular online, how do you do that today? What's your recommendations?
Speaker 3Well, it's a good place to start to acknowledge that you want to work out what your taste is because there's so many people that don't think about that step. And I think testing and trialing books is so important. I think I read a lot of anthologies of short stories when I was younger because I just didn't know what even the canon was and what I should be reading. And it was a great way of just kind of getting a little glimpse of different authors' works. But being able to go to a library, to be able to take out 10 books, even if you only finish reading one of them, that's all helping you kind of make those tastes and make those judgments on what it is that you enjoy more of and you can start to hone it down. And if you can have that conversation with your local bookseller or with your librarian, then they can help you in that testing process. But really, it's about taking off the pressure. You don't have to finish the book and just having a little bit of an explore about different genres and types and styles of title.
Speaker 1You are listening. You're listening to Download This Show on ABC Radio National. And artificial intelligence has created a world where suddenly authors are having to prove that they are human. This is where we're at today. Bec, how is AI changing the way books are written?
Speaker 4Good question. I mean, it's hard to know, I think, because we're, of course, seeing some pretty big literary scandals across the way that books are written, the books that are being submitted for prizes, the way that books have been reviewed. I mean, just this year, there was a scandal that I wrote an article on where a literary critic had used AI to write their review of this book. Similarly, we've seen books pulled from publication because the author has been accused of using AI. So it is, I think, challenging that kind of trust that we have. In the human input into the process. At the same time, I think it's reinforcing the need for the relationship between people in that ecosystem. So to give you a more concrete example, this year, Granta, which is an incredible publication for all writers, but particularly short fiction writers, decided that they were going to cease publication of the winning entries of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. And they said that they won't partner with organisations where they, Granta, don't have editorial control. So this is a bit different to major awards, for example, where the books are already published. But what it does show us is that the way that publishers and other people in that ecosystem of producing and responding to books are responding to this is by going, okay, well, we can't control what people are sending us, we can't sort of we can insist that authors don't use AI, but ultimately that, you know, authors who are going to use AI are going to use AI. What we can do is reinforce the human component to say we want to see the work, we want to see the development of the work, we want to be able to discuss the development of the work with you. And so we're bringing people back into that relationship to rebuild that trust. So for me, that's the way it's shaping it. And that actually seems like quite a positive outcome because more and more these kind of editorial roles have been outsourced and made freelance. And actually what I hope is that in response to these AI crises is that the role of the editor will become more vital than ever before and we'll start to see the revaluing of those skills and that relationship.
Speaker 1How are writers having to prove to publishers that they've been behind the work? I mean, I think one
Speaker 4of the things that we're talking to students about, for example, with their work is how they have to keep a number of drafts. So I don't know how much either of you have sat down to write, you know, lengthy pieces, but I have a terrible habit or had a terrible habit of just writing straight over old drafts. So I didn't have a lot of old files. You don't have a scratch pad? I do that as well. It was very stressful. It was very stressful for my PhD supervisors, I think. But what we're saying now to students in particular is like keep all of that evidence. So keep your weird, scrappy little notebook. Keep your text messages to yourself. Have a dump folder where you keep every single draft. So I think it's partly like storing the physical evidence and partly that being able to get up and defend it and talk about it. And so I just want to, I guess, shout out as well to like book events, book launches writers' festivals who are all doing that work of bringing us authors who are sitting up there on stage talking intelligently and brilliantly about their work. And I think that is evidence that they are the human person behind it, right?
Speaker 1Absolutely. Well, Anna Berkey, CEO of Australia Reads, thank you so much for joining us on Download This Show. Thank you. And Bec Kavanagh, Senior Tutor in Creative Writing and Publishing at the University of Melbourne, thank you for joining us on Download This Show. Thank you. And that's all we've got time for this week. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. And we do love hearing all of your thoughts and your feedback, so send them over. Downloadtheshowatabc.net.au is our email address or you can hit me up on Instagram at Rae Johnston. If you have thoughts you'd like to share on your favourite books, ABC Radio National is holding another Top 100 Books Countdown this year. You can vote now. This year's theme is your favourite Australian books. To vote, text the word BOOKWORM to 0418 226 576 and we'll send you a link to the voting page. You can also find that voting page by searching online. A big thanks to my producer, Jessie Kay, who will pop that link in my show notes. This episode was produced on the lands of the Gadigal, Baramadigal, Dharug, Gundungurra and Wurundjeri peoples. I'm Rae Johnston and you've been listening to Download This Show.
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