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Nonfiction books generally fare better. Listening to a celebrity read his or her own autobiography -- Kirk Douglas' The Ragman's Son, say -- is little different from sitting through a long, entertaining talk-show appearance. David McCullough's 1,117-page Truman is necessarily truncated in its six-hour audio adaptation. But as narrated by McCullough (who performed the same service for TV's The Civil War), it is a pleasure...
...less sappiness than there is in the current hit movie. Hearing Stephen King read the beautifully modulated opening chapter of Needful Things is almost enough to convince you to stick around for the rest of the 24-hour tape. Almost but not quite: one odd aspect of the audio-book market is that King, perhaps the contemporary author who could most benefit from trimming, is the one whose books are never abridged...
With a few exceptions, authors are usually not involved in the cutting of their work for audio. "It would have been too painful," says McCullough of participating in shortening Truman. David Halberstam, who has had several books adapted for tape (among them The Summer of Forty-Nine and The Fifties) claims he has never listened to any of them. "I presume that the people doing the cutting are very good," he says. "But I don't want to hear what they have done...
...contrast, happily picked up the tape of his book Schindler's List and was pleased with the four-hour adaptation read by Ben Kingsley. "The text is not an amputee," he says. "I felt that it represented the essence of the thing very well." After refusing to allow audio condensations of his previous novels, E.L. Doctorow permitted his latest, The Waterworks, to be cut to four audio hours. "I have changed my position on this," he says. "It is pretty clear to me that print culture is under enormous assault today. I take the position now that anything that offers...
Doctorow's dilemma reflects the conflict between purists and realists. Will the popularity of books on tape further erode the interest in reading? Or should we welcome any new literary medium -- even a slightly degraded one like books on tape? One hopeful sign is that despite the boom in audio books, sales of hardcovers and paperbacks have not fallen. Just as Hollywood once feared the advent of videocassettes but later discovered they fed rather than discouraged interest in movies, books on tape may actually promote the cause of literature. Four hours of Doctorow or McCarthy is better than nothing, especially...