https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7303I moved to Boston in 1999, just in time to introduce digital-media students to Edward Bellamy's 1888 socialist utopian novel "Looking Backward 2000 to 1887," set in Boston. (A deeply hypnotized sleeper wakes in the year 2000 after 113 years and tells us what he sees.)
I wasn't actually teaching the novel, or economics, but had the media students search a Project Gutenberg copy for the words "credit card" (replacing cash), "newspaper" (surviving), "telephone" (as broadcasting) and "tubes" (pneumatic) to see what technological changes Bellamy foresaw. It was fun, and I did some web browsing about Bellamy's writing and the "nationalist" social movement discussion groups it inspired.
Last week I downloaded a fresh copy of Anna Simon's charming Librivox reading as a fine companion on walks by the river (for me it's now the New River in southwest Virginia, no longer the Charles) ...
Browsing Bellamy's life story again, I see he published a sequel in 1897, the year before he died. "Equality" has not been recorded on Librivox, but has more of his critique of 1890s America, including predictions on the state of women after his 20th century guaranteed-income, nationalized-industry revolutions.
Browsing a text-file copy of "Equality," I couldn't help noticing references to the narrator's host ("the doctor" in the passage below) having an extensive private library of printed books -- I'll have to go back and see if Bellamy made any reference to audiobooks. BUT he does say the art of writing by hand has seen better days:
"Dear me, dear me!" said I, "don't you write letters any more?"
"Well, no," replied the doctor, "practically speaking, handwriting has gone out of use. For correspondence, when we do not telephone, we send phonographs, and use the latter, indeed, for all purposes for which you employed handwriting. It has been so now so long that it scarcely occurs to us that people ever did anything else. But surely this is an evolution that need surprise you little: you had the phonograph, and its possibilities were patent enough from the first. For our important records we still largely use types, of course, but the printed matter is transcribed from phonographic copy, so that really, except in emergencies, there is little use for handwriting."
I'll keep reading to see whether Bellamy foresaw Librivox, but when it comes time for the book's narrator to learn how the socialist revolution began, the doctor READS to him from a printed book, he doesn't just play him a phonograph