Hi I’m Will. I’m a member of the Bloodhounds Book Group. I work in disability advocacy and am lucky enough to be able to both proof and review books and audiobooks. This is a brief overview of the history of audiobooks and their place in society.
Audiobooks are incredibly important to me personally. But also I’m very lucky to be in the position where they have always been available to me. Be that through family being generous, trawling through charity shops, and being given tapes that couldn’t be sold because they were slightly broken. Because of how important they are to me on a personal level (they allowed me to consume literature, as due to severe dyslexia I only learned to read and write at the age of about 12) I’ve always been fascinated by the history of audiobooks.
It feels very special to be this close to the beginning of the history of something that is so central to my life and the accessibility revolution. I can’t contemplate what it would be like to be this close to the birth of the written word. This is the privileged position that we find ourselves in. The recorded word is really around 100 years old; the invention of the phonograph is a little longer (1877), but the recording of the spoken word being widespread and ubiquitous is incredibly recent.
The widespread publication of audiobooks only really started in the mid-70s with charities for the blind in America and the UK making recordings. These were much more niche, though, often being instruction manuals and more practical things, rather than fiction.
The strides made in the technology in the cassettes meant that libraries had an uptick in the amount of books on tape in stock. The cost of cassettes and the sheer number required to have an unabridged book meant that the price was extortionate (well into the 100s of pounds). The amount that it cost to produce an audiobook meant that it was cheaper and made more sense to produce abridged versions of the fiction that was eventually produced. This is because of the sheer expense of the tapes themselves, but also because it meant renting a studio and all that entails and doing all you could to lessen the amount of studio time was well worth it.
The recordings themselves were definitely less good, but it is also worth remembering that we are now hugely spoiled by the level of quality that is easy to attain in terms of audio, and at a fraction of the price. The thing that really did change everything is the access to recording equipment that happened over the years. There are so many places to record audiobooks, and editing and mastering is something that many more people can do. The movement from physical cassettes and CDs to digital files has also made it much cheaper to produce and to buy audiobooks.
This is the thing that has made audiobooks so popular in recent years, particularly since the digitisation of audiobooks. Largely this has meant that the way that audiobooks are seen in society is completely different to how they had been, just because of mass availability. The ability to have hundreds of audiobooks on your phone in your pocket has completely changed the way that they are viewed, and the download model means there is space for more ethical companies in the same space.
For example there is Borrowbox, which is the app used by local libraries to lend out audiobooks, ebooks and magazines. The best Audible alternative I have found is definitely libro.fm, which works in the same way that bookshop.org does with physical books, as you can choose an indie bookshop to give the profit of your purchase to. There are also, of course, those indie publishers who have cut the costs to their customers by producing and distributing the audiobooks themselves.
This change in the way that audiobooks are sold has altered the way that they are viewed and the place they hold in society now. It’s interesting that they have now become a reading choice rather than simply a reading aid. It is this change that has really improved the quality of the production of audiobooks. It used to be the case that as long as the book was read, it didn’t matter what the listening experience was like, which is what has made a huge difference to the perception of audiobooks and those that use them.
I, for one, am incredibly glad that the attitude is changing. Of course there will be people who look down on audiobooks and all of us that use them, but in all honesty that’s their loss and they are missing out.