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Listen to Any Good Books Lately?
| Article
# : |
19329 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1991 |
2,728 Words |
| Author
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Judith Bell
Judith Bell is an art historian and novelist based in
Arlington, Virginia. |
While you won't find Bret Ellis' gory thriller American Psycho on audiocassette, you will find audio versions of a host of other fashionable titles--Katherine Hepburn's autobiography, Me; Anne Tyler's new novel, St. Maybe; and the winner of this year's National Book Award, Charles Johnson's Middle Passage. They are shelved alongside their print edition counterparts. Increasingly, and in response to their overwhelming popularity, cassette recordings of new books are released at the same time as the print editions.
Audio books have revolutionized the way Americans read in a time when great numbers of us are caught up in a too-little-time too-much-to-do life-style. People who find they have less time for the printed page, or whose work involves a lot of reading, are finding that audio books afford them the opportunity to catch up on books they want to read.
Audio converts listen while handling mundane household chores, during exercise, while in the dentist's chair, and even while deer hunting. Commuters are industry's biggest customers. Audio books seem to have been created for the interstates, beltways, and turnpikes, where FM radio stations fade away every few miles and the lines of concrete barely vary. Commuters say they find themselves concentrating on details they would have skimmed over if they had been using their eyes, on the richness, the pacing the author originally intended. Others speak of the uncanny intensity of being shut up in a car with a voice that becomes the author or the protagonist. And yes, these book-riveted drivers do find themselves suddenly oblivious to the diesel fumes, the roadside litter, the uninspired architectural skyline. Their turnpikes could be parkways for all they care.
Duvall Hecht's pioneer audio book company, Books on Tape, Inc., was born of his personal need to escape a severe case of "cranial atrophy." Commuting daily between Newport Beach and Los Angeles in the midseventies, Hecht found himself going mad with frustration. "There was nothing to listen to on tape except poetry, the Bible, and Earl Nightingale telling you how to close insurance sales. You couldn't get readings of best-selling books." Staring at the endless lines of backed-up cars, Hecht realized that here was a ready-made market. In 1975, he began producing full-length readings of best-sellers and classics offered to individuals on a rental basis through the mails.
Except for the small companies producing audio books for libraries, Hecht had the field to himself for several years. But by the early eighties the major
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