What? I say, what?

My father never read to me, but when I watch Monk, I weep for the man with the soothing voice whom I never knew.

Digital audiobooks, especially those narrated by talented artists, can "extend the pleasure of being read to by your parents into 5th, 6th, 7th grades," he [Katz] says. And talented artists are lining up to narrate — Macmillan Audio launched a children's list this spring with narrations by Gwyneth Paltrow and Tony Shaloub.

This is according to this Associated Press report,

Nearly a third of children ages 6 to 10 are regular users of digital audio players, according to market research firm the NPD Group. And thanks to entrepreneurs like [Don] Katz, they can now use them to listen to bedtime stories.

In March, the Audible.com founder launched AudibleKids.com, where children can download books directly onto their digital audio players.

"I hear lots of people talking, saying that when they put their kids to bed, they put them down with an audiobook," says Audio Publishers Association president Michele Cobb.

And those people should be shot. I don't know how kids' bodies develop, but they probably shouldn't be sleeping with earbuds stuck in their ears. I have an mp3 player and it has all these warnings about playing loud music for extended periods of time, and I'm pretty sure it says you shouldn't use them when you're sleeping. And these parents put the kid into bed, and say, "not too loud" without defining what "too loud" is, and then leave the kid alone for eight hours. Sure, you can set volume limits on an iPod, if you remember, or if you want your kid to hate you.

"In a way," Linn says, "this is another gadget for outsourcing parenting." [Susan Linn is the author of "The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in Our Commercialized World."]

That's right. We all know, this is just more crap for us to buy. Hell, you can go back to the 1960s and find some comedian telling the joke about listening to the vocabulary building self-improvement record when he goes to bed, but during the night, the record skips, and now he stutters. (Okay, the only example I could find is from Steven Wright, but I'm sure I heard Shecky Green tell it.) So today's kids aren't any more evolved to listen to loud sounds just because they explode from an iPod. When I was a kid, I had an 8-track tape player that opened up so that I could put one speaker next each ear, and I often went to sleep listening to Pink Floyd. And I had the freakiest dreams. Imagine what dreams the kid will have who listens to Anne of Green Gables as read by Gilbert Gottfried.

So I'm probably one of those people who will be deaf soon. I listen to music that's way too loud. One time I was at an indoor concert with the band My Bloody Valentine, and it got so loud that my vision cut out. I couldn't see at all, and I shuffled over to a wall and leaned there until it came back. I'd never heard something so loud before. It was only after that blackout that I noticed most of the other kids there were wearing earplugs. Pussies.

But parents shouldn't be sending their kids to bed with crap in their ears or with six-foot cables waiting to wrap around their necks and strangle them. And if you don't believe me, here are some helpful tips for not going deaf. Which I'll probably never listen to.

Note: Yes, I know that they don't need to use earbuds to listen, that they can dock the player in a base with speakers. But do you think I thought about that before I wrote this thing? No, I did not. And I for damn sure am not deleting this post just because of some lack of research on my part. Nope, I wrote it, so you're reading it. We can argue the facts some other time.