Audio Books

Catching up over coffee, a woman impresses her friend by saying she got through five books in a week, explaining that she plays audiobooks while she cooks, cleans and watches TV. A woman reading a paperback at the next table cuts in to argue that listening to someone else read is not the same thing, and keeps needling her with imagined pairings of literary classics and household chores. The friend fires back that her companion has a degenerative eye condition that worsens every time she reads anything, accuses the stranger of gatekeeping, and hustles her out of the cafe while steering her eyes away from the menu on the wall. Left alone, the purist appeals to the room for a fellow reader and recommends Ayn Rand, only for another patron to pull out an earbud and explain that she missed the question because she was busy reading too.

When CBC Comedy posted the sketch to YouTube, the channel added a note acknowledging that audiobooks are an essential tool for people who cannot read printed text, with a link to a CBC Radio segment on the format's history.