I'm only seconds into a digital copy of T.S. Eliot's famous ode to adolescence, The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock, when my ears prickle uncomfortably. As I read-"Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky, / Like a patient etherised upon a table"-a soft rock track reminiscent of James Taylor begins to crescendo in the background. Eliot's arch observations are drowned out by the acoustic guitar and its upbeat melody.
For a dose of relief I turn to YouTube, where I find a copy of an old recording that features Eliot himself reading the text, sans soundtrack. The strange and charmed rhymes, the brooding hint of menace, the nasal timbre of literary elitism: At once, the poem is restored. By the time Eliot intones, "Time yet for a hundred visions and revisions," I'm engrossed in the text, lost to the world.
And so it's with a skeptical ear and eye that I return to Booktrack, which sells digital books that pair text with music and ambient sounds. Since its founding in 2010, Booktrack has grown its library of titles to 15,000 and raised $10 million from investors, including Silicon Valley kingmaker Peter Thiel. The success of audio book provider Audible, which sold to Amazon for $300 million, beckons.