An audiobook or audio book is a recording of a text being read. It is not necessarily an exact audio version of a book or magazine.
Spoken audio has been available in schools and public libraries and to a lesser extent in music shops since the 1930s. Many spoken word albums were made prior to the age of videocassettes, DVDs, and compact discs, often of plays rather than books. It was not until the 1980s that the medium began to attract book retailers, and then book retailers started displaying audiobooks on bookshelves rather than in separate displays.
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Possibly the first audio book was a recorded edition of What A Young Boy Ought To Know, a series of sermons on wax phonograph cylinder by Sylvanus Stall, an audio form of the best-selling 1897 book.[1] Many spoken word recordings of stories were sold on cylinder in the early 1900s.[2]
In 1931, Congress established the talking-book program, which was intended to help blind adults who couldn’t read print. This program was called "Books for the Adult Blind Project." The American Foundation for the Blind developed the first talking books in 1932. One year later the first reproduction machine began the process of mass publishing. In 1933 anthropologist J.P. Harrington drove the length of North America to record oral histories of Native American tribes on aluminum discs using a car battery-powered turntable. Audiobooks preserve the oral tradition of storytelling that J.P. Harrington pursued many years ago.[3] By 1935, after Congress approved free mailings of audio books to blind citizens, the Books for the Adult Blind Project was in full operation. In 1992 the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Challenged (NLS) network circulated millions of recorded books to more than 700,000 Physically challenged listeners. All NLS recordings were created by professionals.
Though spoken recordings were popular in 33-1/3 vinyl record format for schools and libraries into the early 1970s, the beginning of the trade acceptance of this medium can be traced to the introduction of the audio cassette and, most importantly, to the prevalence of these cassette players as standard equipment (rather than as options which older drivers did not choose) in imported (Japanese) automobiles, which became very popular during the 1979 energy crisis. Thereafter, consumers and authors slowly accepted the medium. Into the early 1980s there were still many authors who refused to have their books created as audiobooks, so a good many of the audiobooks were original productions not based upon printed books.
With the development of portable cassette recorders, audiotapes had become very popular and by the late 1960s libraries became a source of free audiobooks, primarily on vinyl records but also on cassettes. Instructional and educational recordings came first, followed by self-help tapes and then by literature. In 1975, Olympic gold medalist, Duvall Hecht founded Books on Tape, Inc. as a direct to consumer mail order rental service for unabridged audiobooks and expanded their services selling their products to libraries and audiobooks gaining popularity with commuters and travelers. By the middle of 1980s the audio publishing business grew to several billion dollars a year in retail value.
Caedmon was the first to work with integrated production teams and professional actors, while Nightingale Conant featured business and self-help authors reading their own works first on vinyl records and then on cassettes.[4]
The Audio Publishers Association was established in 1986 by six competitive companies who joined together to promote the consumer awareness of spoken word audio. In 1996 the Audio Publishers Association established the Audie Awards for audio books, which is equivalent to the Oscar for the talking books industry. The nominees are announced each year in January. The winners are announced at a gala banquet in the spring, usually in conjunction with BookExpo America.[5]
While most music fans rapidly accepted CDs, audiobook listeners were slower. One reason may have been that a cassette tape by nature retains its position when the player is turned off, but many early CD players did not retain the playing position of CDs when turned off. Also, it was not until cassette players were replaced by CD players in most automobiles that this format eventually took hold.
With the advent of the Internet, broadband technologies, new compressed audio formats and portable media players, the popularity of audiobooks has increased significantly. This growth was reflected with the advent of audiobook download subscription services.
Producing an audiobook consists of a narrator sitting in a recording booth reading the text, while a studio engineer and a director record and direct the performance.[6] If a mistake is made the recording is stopped and the narrator reads it again.[6]
Narrators are usually paid on a finished recorded hour basis, meaning if it took 20 hours to produce a 5 hour book, the narrator is paid for 5 hours, thus providing an incentive not to make mistakes.[6] Depending on the narrator they are paid US$150 per finished hour to US$400 (as of 2011[update]).[6] The overall cost to produce an audiobook is US$5,000 at the minimum to many tens of thousands, depending on the length of the book and the narrator (as of 2011[update]).[6]
Audiobooks are distributed on CDs, cassette tapes, downloadable digital formats (e.g., MP3 (.mp3), Windows Media Audio (.wma), Advanced Audio Coding (.aac)) and preloaded digital in which the audio content is preloaded and sold together with a hardware device.
In 2005 cassette-tape sales were 16% of the audiobook market,[7] with CD sales accounting for 74% of the market and downloadable audio books accounting for approximately 9%. In the United States, a sales survey (performed by the Audio Publishers' Association in the summer of 2006 for the year 2005) estimated the industry to be worth 871 million US dollars.
A small number of books are recorded for radio broadcast, (radio programs serializing books), usually in abridged form and sometimes serialized, notably by the BBC. The advent of the Internet has introduced powerful means of delivery for audiobooks; many titles are now available on-line (for download on to computers, tablets, and phones, or one may listen to website audio streams without having to download anything).
Audiobooks may come as fully dramatized versions of the printed book, sometimes calling upon a complete cast, music, and sound effects. A dramatized audio adaptation of a book is effectively an audio drama.
Sometimes audiobook format is available simultaneously with book publication.
Recent technology has encouraged the proliferation of free audiobooks that take works from the public domain and enlist volunteers to read them. Audiobooks also can be created with text to speech computer software, although the quality of synthesized speech may suffer by comparison to recordings by a human voice. On the other hand, computer-voiced reading enables the proliferation of more works faster through automation, than if read by humans.
Audiobooks in the private domain are also distributed online by for-profit companies. Until recently, major audiobook publishers required that their works be protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM), when sold as downloads, but this is no longer the case. Companies such as Apple Inc. have licensed their proprietary FairPlay DRM system (for DRM protection of iPod files in the .aa file format) to only one company.[8] Because of the long-standing major publishers' insistence on DRM, this effectively created a monopoly in the sale of the works of major publishers to iPod users, who make up the majority of the portable audio market.[9]
Audiobooks on cassette or CD are typically more expensive than hardcovers because of the added expense of recording and the lack of the economy of scale in high "print" runs that are available in the publishing of printed books. Downloadable audiobooks tend to cost slightly less than hardcovers but more than their paperback equivalents. Market penetration of audiobooks is substantially lower than for their printed counterparts despite the high market penetration of the hardware (MP3 and WMA players) and despite the massive market penetration achieved by audio music products.
However, there are certain economies of scale that favor downloadable audiobooks. Downloadable audiobooks do not carry mass production costs, do not require storage of a large inventory, do not require physical packaging or transportation and even if "returned" do not require a cost of physical return or destruction/disposal. If such economies were passed on to customers, unit profit margins would be reduced but sales volumes would increase. It is not known what effect this would have on book sales in other formats.
Audiobooks have been used to teach children to read and to increase reading comprehension. They are also useful for the blind. The National Library of Congress in the U.S. and the CNIB Library in Canada provide free audiobook library services to the visually impaired; requested books are mailed out (at no cost) to clients. Founded in 1996, Assistive Media of Ann Arbor, Michigan was the first organization to produce and deliver spoken-word recordings of written journalistic and literary works via the Internet to serve people with visual impairments.
About forty percent of all audiobook consumption occurs through public libraries, with the remainder served primarily through retail book stores. Library download programs are currently experiencing rapid growth (more than 5,000 public libraries offer free downloadable audio books). Libraries are also popular places to check out audio books in the CD format.[10] According to the National Endowment for the Arts' recent study, "Reading at Risk", audio book listening is one of very few "types" of reading that is increasing general literacy.
Audio books are considered a valuable learning tool because of their format. Unlike traditional books or a video program, one can learn from an audiobook while doing other tasks, although it should be noted that this can detract from the primary task, assuming the learning is not the main activity. Such multitasking is feasible when doing mechanical tasks that do not require much thought and have only little or no chance of an emergency arising. Such tasks include doing the laundry and exercising indoors, among others. The most popular general use of audiobooks by adults is when driving an automobile or traveling with public transport, as an alternative to radio. Many people listen as well just to relax or as they drift off into sleep.
Common practices include:
Listening Books is an audiobook charity in the UK providing an internet streaming and postal service to anyone who has a disability or illness which makes it difficult to hold a book, turn its pages, or read in the usual way. They have audiobooks for both leisure and learning and a library of over 4,000 titles which are recorded in their own digital studios or commercially sourced.
The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) is a UK charity which offers a Talking Books library service. The audio books are provided in DAISY format and delivered to the reader's house by post. There are over 18,000 audio books available to borrow, paid for by annual subscription. RNIB subsidises the Talking Books service by around £4 million a year.[11]