The story of audio books
It’s really amazing that you can get the exact value listening to an audio book while doing your normal chores as you would reading it.
Some experts have even said that we can absorb information better when we are actually not paying full attention to them.
But what when was the time that this audio book craze began? In other words, what is the past of audio books?
From all indications, audio books look like a very recent invention, right?
WRONG!
It is very easy to make the assumption that audio books are a recent invention because of the mention of CDs, downloadable digital formats, MP3s, PDAs and other technological jargons each time audio books are discussed. But audio books started way before now.
In order for us to know just how long audio books have existed, we first need to know what audio books actually are.
Forget any other jargon you may have seen, audio books are just books that are in audio format, to be listened to instead of read.
Even so, recorded versions of books have existed for a very long time, far before now. To be completely specific, you could say that they have been around since for the last 50 years.
It could even be much longer, if you take into account the Library of Congress recordings especially made for the American Foundation for the Blind and distributed free throughout the U.S.
Although Robin Whitten (Editor and Founder of the only magazine which is only available to the audio book industry) said – Audiofile–http://www.AudioFileMagazine.com, Caedmon (now a subsidiary of HarperCollins Publishers) can be credited for starting the recording of literature as far back as half a century ago.
Going further, he said Caedmon was just a small company way back then in New York, which started recording the audio of great authors and poets of the 1950s. Specifically, he has said that one of the earliest recordings ever made were of the greats such as Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Fitzgerald and Robert Frost.
Then they were just recorded when they were doing their own works and then made as vinyl records.
But these early recordings can arguably pass off for the first collection of audio books ever.
However, the transition of these book recordings into audiocassette tapes didn’t happen until the late 1970s up to the 1980s. From thence, it blossomed until audio books in audiocassette tapes came to be accepted by all and sundry.
For whatever reason however, the audio book phenomenon didn’t really kick off until the 1990s.
And now that we have changed from cassette tapes to compact disks even more people have an interest in audio books.
With the explosion of the world wide web and everything that comes with it, audio books have now gone from vinyl records, tapes and CDs into downloadable digital formats. These can be listened to in many different ways, on a desktop PC, laptop, MP3 player etc.
If you are still interested in “going back in time” you can get the original book recordings that started this audio book industry.
Impossible?
Not really.
Some of those early 1950s analog recordings by Caedmon which were performed by the greats of those days can be purchased today on the Internet.
For example, recently I was able to browse the Internet thoroughly and found the original recording of “The Lord of the Rings” as read by J.R.R. Tolken.
You can find that classic you have always dreamt of in audio book format if you search hard enough on the Internet.
An excellent source that I have found for audio book downloads is Spoken Network. You can find them at:
www.spokennetwork.com?cam=ama0016
