Listen to Audio Books Online – History Repeats Itself

I have tried to convince many friends to listen to audio books online. This really is not any different to reading a regular book, except that someone else’s voice does the reading for you. Apparently the move from the ‘traditional book’ to a compact disc or mp3 has resulted in a large group of skeptical people who doubt that it is possible to truly appreciate a novel by listening, rather than physically reading. Funnily, it is actually the younger people that are harder to convince to give it a go.

Because my grandmother had grown up listening to stories told on the radio she was more than willing to listen to audio books online – in fact, she found it a pleasure as she could sit quite comfortably, do her cross stitch or even do the gardening while she listens to the recordings. Audio books have been around for a very long time, in fact, many of our grandparents grew up listening to the British Broadcasting Company with its serialized classics. History shows that as early as 1933 an anthropologist J.P. Harrington researched and recorded the oral histories of the Native American tribes.

The American Congress saw a need to provide extra resources for people with sight impairment, and as a result the “Books for the Adult Blind Project” was initiated. This project was the stepping stone for audio books or ‘talking books’ and before long the mass reproduction of them began. In later years the National Library Service provided a much needed public-service for blind citizens across America by recording millions of books in an audio format.

Audio Books and Popular Culture

Massive advancement in technology has driven the audio book online format into the reach of consumers who embraced the development with enthusiasm. It was in the early 1960’s when the introduction of the portable cassette player recorder allowed ease of use. This coincided with the ever increasing popularity of the pursuit for self-improvement. This style of recordings, with emphasis on instructional or educational subjects, became very popular. Self-help audio-books were well and truly in vogue and the initiative was expanded to include audio books on a wide variety of general topics such as the humanities.

Audio book recordings became even bigger and quickly a market was created that catered for people wanting to rent popular titles. Listening to audio book online became a multi billion-dollar industry and producers helped the industry grow by introducing high-quality recordings done with large casts of voices.

Today, the audio book concept has embraced leading edge technology which has made the product much more accessible to the general public than ever before. The vast array of product available can now be easily downloaded from the web and its formats incorporated into any digital listening device such as cell phones, MP3 players and Ipods. In view of this modern and cutting edge tools, it is highly likely that the young people of today might even gain an appreciation for a classical author such as Jane Austen or William Shakespeare.

It is ironic that the advent of the audio book online has not fully replaced printed books version but instead has only highlighted the joys of books in general.

Behind the Scenes Creation of Audio Books

Many people have discovered the joys of listening to their favorite fiction authors on audio book, but not many realize the great detail and behind the scenes preparation that goes into the recording and production of an audio book. The total length of the audio book versions of the immensely popular “Harry Potter” series, for instance, is 117 hours and four minutes. According to officials at Listening Library, the Random House division that publishes the audio books, it would take five days to listen straight to all seven books. The final audio book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” alone, s 21 hours, 38 minutes long and consists of 17 CDs or 12 audio cassettes. The narrator for all seven “Harry Potter” audio books is English actor Jim Dale, who has won Grammy awards for his performances of more than 200 characters in the fiction series. He holds the record for creating the most voices in an audio book in the Guinness Book of World Records. Recording audio books is tricky, says Dale, who only saw his material two or three days before his recording was to begin. And he never knew where the story was going as he never got the chance to read the entire book before he started. On a good day, Dale read the audio books at a rate of 18 to 20 pages an hour, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. with several breaks to protect his voice. It usually took ten days to complete the audio book recordings. The published print version of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” is 784 pages, and it required almost two and a half weeks to record the audio book. The publishers kept digital files of all the voices Dale used so that he could recreate them for each audio book. But he had to take into the account the aging of the main characters Harry, Ron and Hermione, who started out as 10 and 11 in “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and who are now 17 and 18 in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” For new characters, Dale used a tape recorder to record one or two sentences in a new voice and noted the place in the text. At the studio he would rewind until he found the right voice and play it back to refresh his memory before recording the audio book. The producers were great sticklers to being absolutely verbatim to the text of the audio books, and Dale admits there were many mistakes, especially when he stumbled on words not on the author’s list. He would have to record it in context in several ways to account for every possible pronunciation. “If she says ‘someone laughs, ha, ha, ha, and I do four ha’s,’ I am stopped and told, ‘Just do three,” says Dale.