Interesting fact: Cuban cigars are named thing like Romeo y Julieta or Monte Christo, because those were the books read aloud as those cigars were being rolled.

I'm pretty sure Cuban cigar factories still employ lectors. At least as recently as 2009, when the BBC reported:

    Today, though, the tradition only survives in Cuba, 
    with an estimated 250 'lectores' or cigar readers
    employed at factories across the island†
    

250 may not sound like alot, but it's a small island, where the government oversees production - there are are only a few dozen brands of cigars. So I'm guessing, with 250 readers, most factories have one on the floor.

† http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8406641.stm

That explains why I got one called Captain Underpants one time...

Is there a source for this? I don't doubt you but I'd love to read more about this. That is an interesting fact.

I learnt it on a tour of a factory in Cuba!

How is a lector different from audible/youtube/podcasts?

1. More comfortable than wearing headphones or earphones all day.

2. The fact that it's a human speaking makes particularly annoying sounds (eg. most music) impossible. There is also strong social pressure to not be annoying, because the person to blame is right there in the room.

I wouldn't want it personally, I can't focus with people talking in the same room and this extends to the music I listen to when doing tasks that require focus (coding, drawing, reading, etc), I need it to be instrumental because otherwise it just throws me off. First discovered this trying to read in a break room at one of my first jobs and realized that I was processing the conversations around me even when I didn't want to (made only worse by the fact that both English and Spanish conversations were going on that I could understand.)

So we can go ahead and get a lector, but I'll be tuning them out with headphones or working from home.

How is talking to a person in front of you different from talking to someone via Skype/video-conference ?

Proximity matters.

I wonder how important they were for union support, seeing as how they often read left-leaning stuff. Why did this job disappear? Does it have something to do with the decline in the organisation of labour and unions?