TOWARDS AUDIO BOOKS

For the last generation, would‐be seers have peered into their VDTs and tried to visualise the future of the book in pixels. But if in looking forward to the next century we pause to harken to the past, many of us will remember our first consciousness of the 21st Century as an impending paradigmatic change coming not from the labs of IBM or Apple but from Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. And what do we remember about that work? Not the light show at the end (though we recall there was one) but the character of HAL, as brought to life by the voice of actor Douglas Rain. Perhaps this was the voice of the millennium. Chances are we won't be going to the moon for our birthday (done that, been there) but we will have computers in our dens with our books, cassettes and compact discs.