Word: audio
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Retail sales for audio books (which typically cost around $17 for a two- cassette package) reached $1.2 billion in 1993, up 40% from the year before. Titles and celebrity readers are proliferating. Sharon Stone has just been signed to narrate The Scarlet Letter. Gone With the Wind is about to be released on tape for the first time, unabridged on 30 cassettes. "Nine years ago, only 8% of the population had heard a book on tape; now it's close to 25%," says Michael Viner, co-founder of Dove Audio, a nine-year-old Los Angeles company that helped pioneer...
Bidding wars for the audio rights to potential best sellers are becoming nearly as heated as those waged over movie rights. Tom Clancy's newest novel, Debt of Honor, was picked up by Random House Audio for a record sum -- reportedly $1 million. Though sales of a typical book on tape still represent only a fraction of the hardcover sales (usually 10% or less), the numbers are climbing. The Bridges of Madison County, read by author Robert James Waller, sold 163,000 audio copies. Some 250,000 tapes of John Grisham's latest novel, The Chamber, have been shipped...
...retail front, the racks of audio books that have sprouted in bookshops are appearing in video and record stores as well. "The biggest problem we faced in growing this business was a lack of consumer awareness," says Jenny Frost, vice president and publisher of Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio. "Now people are finding them in retail outlets, trying them and discovering they think they are great." Inevitably, specialty stores have begun to crop up. Houston's BookTronics is one of the largest to carry nothing but audio -- with 8,000 titles for sale and rent. "We call ourselves the bookstore...
...purists wince at the prospect of tapes undermining the printed page. Yet listening to a book is not an experience to be sneered at. Storytelling began as an oral art, after all, and there can be something profoundly satisfying about hearing a book read aloud. In some ways an audio book demands more concentration than a printed one. Reading allows freedom -- the freedom to proceed at one's own pace, to stop and savor a passage, to pause and reread or jump ahead and skim. With an audio book, the pace is steady and unyielding; if a moment's distraction...
...greatest drawback to audio books, of course, is that they are usually heavily abridged. (Unabridged versions are available for many books, both in stores and through mail order, but they represent a relatively small segment of the market.) Most mass-market audio books are boiled down to a length of three to six hours. Even at a relatively brisk reading pace of a minute-and-a- half per page, that typically means more than half the author's prose is left on the cutting-room floor. Rather than tamper with the author's language, editors make an effort to select...