Audiobooks opened up a new world

NONFICTION As Matthew Rubery notes in “The Untold Story of the Talking Book,” a number of writers of the late 1800s contended that “the recorded book was not merely an alternative to the printed book. It was the realization of what the book was always meant to do.”

Rubery’s history of what we now call audiobooks focuses on content, creative breakthroughs and user experience. He tells memorable stories about what the technology has meant to the blind, and he explains why some authors resisted the idea of audio recordings. He also recounts the industry’s enormous expansion in the second half of the 20th century. All of this is interesting.

But his reporting on the publishing world’s finances isn’t as timely as it could be. Rubery says that audiobook sales, which in the late 1990s were generating less than $500 million a year, hit $1.2 billion in 2012. But if you want up-to-date information about the growth of the market, you’ll need to look elsewhere. According to the Audio Publishers Association, sales have increased 20 percent in each of the past two years, topping $1.75 billion in 2015.

Rubery, who teaches literature at Queen Mary University in London, is better at evoking the past. He traces the idea of the audiobook to a 17th-century novel by Cyrano de Bergerac. The Frenchman envisioned a “book made wholly for the Ears and not for the Eyes.” Two centuries passed before Edison unveiled his phonograph. The inventor suggested that recorded books could fundamentally change reading. “The advantages of such books over those printed are too readily seen to need mention,” he wrote in 1878.

It was the 1930s before soundrecording technology could accommodate full-length books on sequential phonograph records. The titles that emerged in the interwar years were funded by Congress and produced for the blind, most of whom didn’t read Braille. As Rubery notes, “The talking book only exists because a group of people had no access to books.” The first batch included Shakespeare, the Bible and P.G. Wodehouse.

Rubery uses letters sent to the American Federation for the Blind to chronicle how the recordings were received. “I cannot give you any idea of what these Talking Books mean to those of us who cannot read ordinary print,” a Maryland woman wrote. An Oregon resident liked to “lie down, put on my head phones, light a cigarette or pipe, and enjoy the world’s finest drama.” A Georgian was pleased that “The Book of Negro Humor” had been recorded but wondered why the reader was “some elderly white spinster who probably wears pince-nez or bifocals.”

Some authors shunned the new technology. Margaret Mitchell said no to a “Gone With the Wind” recording because she worried that “her book might be broadcast over the radio,” Rubery reports. Willa Cather refused for aesthetic reasons. “The vocalization,” she wrote, “is often done by people with horrid voices and sentimental mannerisms.” Thomas Mann, however, was thrilled that “Buddenbrooks” would be recorded. No award “has touched me more,” he wrote, than the knowledge that his novel would “speak to those whom fate has denied the eyesight to read it.”

“The Untold Story of the Talking Book” closes with a look at how contemporary publishers and authors are modifying the form. Novelist Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game,” he notes, was reinvented as an “audioplay” with music and sound effects, and Kathryn Stockett’s “The Help” features “a multiracial cast of four southern women.”