The future of books in the 1880s. ‘Many books and stories may not see the light of print al all; they will go into the hands of their readers, or hearers rather, as phonograms’ Hubert, Philippe in an 1889 essay in the Atlantic Monthly. The same year, Edward Bellamy predicted in a Harper’s article that people will read ‘with the eyes shut’, carrying tiny audio players which would contains all theirs books, newspapers and magazines’ (Carr 2010: 109).