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Forget e-books, this may be the real future of reading

December 9, 2015

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All good business stories begin with an economist admitting he has no idea what’s going on.

“I just don’t get it,” Richard Thaler told me a few months ago, when I asked how his book tour was going. “More people are listening to my book than reading it.”

Thaler is an entertaining writer as academics go, deftly distilling complex ideas. And the subject of his book, “Misbehaving,” is compelling: the psychological quirks and failings that distinguish actual humans from the rational action figures many economists suppose walk the Earth. I had to agree with Thaler, because I didn’t get it either.

Though I’m a heavy audiobook listener, and have written about how the technology is changing our relationships with reading, exercise and time, that audio has grown popular enough to outsell some traditional books is hard to fathom. Audiobooks racked up $1.5 billion in sales last year and remain the fastest-growing segment of the book publishing industry, according to the Audio Publishers Association, but text is still king.

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