What if one part of technology had progressed, such as the music industry, while book technology remained stagnant? It would be pretty bizarre to imagine a world where CDs and mp3s existed but manuscripts were still the main source of book-making. It is almost impossible to think that history would have progressed in such a way, but let’s just pretend for an instant that it did. Music and audio recordings would have been a much more popular way to record and pass along information, and the music industry nowadays would probably have been much more advanced than it is now. The book would have a fraction of its importance and worth, and reading would be somewhat of an elitist thing; people who had money and time to purchase and read books would be the only ones investing in them, whereas busy people on the go would simply listen to everything while additionally doing something else. The world would be a much different place.
If that were the case, I feel like audio essays and radio recordings of books would be extremely popular, whereas the books themselves would be either incredibly expensive or a dying art form. It would really change the way literature was written.
This scenario would tend to lead to a world where the written word would be obsolete. This would be a totally different world, where street signs and billboards were instead sounds. People would be constantly bombarded by audio recordings, it would be an auditory overload nightmare.
Podcasts would be incredibly more important than they are now. On a rather different note, what would this difference (audio over written) have a large environmental impact? The printers at Skillman seem to always be working in overdrive with everyone printers packets to read for class. With no textbook industry, would a company like Apple/iTunes have an even bigger share of profits with audio textbooks?