On June 25 I blogged about audiobooks, and five days later, coincidentally enough, The New York Times had an unrelated feature on the subject. My thanks to Norman Haase, who called my attention to this letter in the Times:
To the Editor:
Re “Actors Today Don’t Just Read for the Part. Reading IS the Part” (front page, June 30):
I am deeply grateful to those wonderful actors and engineers who get the audiobooks to me. I don’t know how I got any housework done before audiobooks.
I started years ago with tapes from the library on a Sony Walkman; now I mostly do Audible.com downloads on an iPod.
My favorite authors include Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Haddon, Nick Hornby and Lawrence Block.
MARGARET STEIN
Minneapolis, June 30, 2013
Nice company! Thank you, Margaret.
I have never listened to audio books but I am looking forward to a long drive this summer to drop my daughter off at college and I think i am going to try them and see how it goes.
I started producing audiobooks of my work because all my neighbors told me they don’t read. (To be fair, one of them said it was because of vision problems.) So far I’ve been able to collaborate with wonderful narrators and tap into a new audience.
Excellent, Francis. How do you distribute them?
Larry, when you’ve recorded your own work…have you gone into a studio to do so, or do you have your own setup at home, as many narrators seem to these days?
I’ve always gone to a studio. The NYTimes article is the first I’ve heard of voice artists having their own recording facilities.