Every hundred years or so, there comes along a new idea or innovation that changes life dramatically. The invention of canning made it possible to store food without spoilage. The advent of the automobile gave people mobility they never had before. When the telephone came into being, it suddenly became possible for individuals to stay in contact with others over great distances and with the invention of television, the rapid sharing of ideas has become an expected way of life.
Although Astrology has existed for many thousands of years, a great deal of astrological knowledge has been lost because of the lack of preservation methods in early civilizations. Since the advent of moveable type, and the beginning of the printing age, Astrology has been recorded more carefully in books so that each new generation can build on a past it can access.
Even up to as much as a century ago, most Astrology books were in hardbound, hardcover volumes. While this was a lot easier than carrying around a carved stone (from the days of the Mayans), it nevertheless was much too bulky for the student who might want to carry a few books at a time.
From this, came the advent of paperback astrology books. For the last half century, most astrological ideas have been passed down in this manner. Of lighter weight and less bulk than the hardbound books, these appealed to convenience and practicality.
However, as the Piscean Age came to an end in the late nineteen hundreds, a seed change began to slowly take place in book publishing. Many publishing houses found that as more people were being introduced to the internet, fewer people had the patience to read books,- a rather sad commentary on the direction of our culture.
As luck would have it, history has a way of bringing different evolutionary processes together when the time is right for them to join. The less people had patience to read books, newspapers and magazines, the more people were creating a need for electronic media as a replacement. However, for this to happen, several different and seemingly unrelated technologies had to be ready.
The average book reader would hardly have noticed the tremendously immense technological advancements in electronic sound recordings that were happening in the background. With the invention of MP3, now the current standard of excellent quality of sound recordings made possible by the demands of computer users, digital sound could be reproduced with startling accuracy.
While Audio books were starting to come into their own as tape cassettes during the nineteen nineties, the new MP3 standard, brings the start of a whole new digital era in sound recordings. Tapes have a tendency to bend, wobble, stretch with humidity as well as tear or break. Yet, digital MP3 recordings suffer from none of these weaknesses. In fact, where tape recordings would lose clarity over time, the new MP3 digital recordings on computer files, show absolutely no degradation over at least 25 years per recording. How many books do you own from twenty five years ago that are in the same condition today as when you bought them?
What does all this mean for Astrology? For one thing, it means the methods for recording information so that future generations can benefit from them keeps improving dramatically. For another, and maybe this is more important, Astrology is a learning process, and it has been proven many times over that the spoken word is a better way to learn than reading words. Try to remember something you read somewhere. Then try to remember something that somebody said to you. See what comes to mind faster!
Well ok, that may be true, but it's not so easy carrying around a desktop to play these files on. True. Yet, here is where another cooperation from history comes into play. As more people realize the advantages of MP3 sound, the need to also have portable ways to hear this sound pushed efforts to invent many new electronic devices almost simultaneously. Within only the last couple of years or so, we have gone from one or two MP3 players on the market, to literally hundreds.
The Ipod from Apple, can play MP3 files that were downloaded on a regular desktop computer. I have recently seen new MP3 players that work in wristwatches and eyeglasses. They are getting smaller, more portable and lightweight, yet with no sacrifice of digital sound quality.
For Astrology, this makes Audio books the perfect medium. In fact, in this day and age of information technology, Audio books can be structured into very small files, so that each Astrological topic (not just chapter) can be on its own file. This means that for the student, or even the astrologer doing research, the ability to find the exact place of an idea, refer to a lesson or something of interest, becomes easier than it has ever been.
Yet, this is only the beginning. Audio books are not only easier, more portable and more learnable from the point of view of the student, they have another advantage for the publisher and listener alike. In the days of paperbound books, if a table, an ephemeris, an idea or date or chapter had to be updated, it was impossible to do this, without ordering a reprint of the entire book.
With Audio books, a book could be many files, sometimes more than a hundred in larger books, yet if something needs to be updated, edited or corrected, it often only takes repairing the single file that needs it, to update the entire book. This means publishers can keep Audio Books more current than they could paperbound books, and listeners can benefit from this in more ways than I can imagine in this article. There is no question about it, Astrology Audio Books are in their infancy and if listeners can learn faster and more thorough because of this medium, than we can only conclude that Astrology too will benefit from this vast increase in sharing knowledge.
