The History of Audio books

Is'nt it amazing that you can get the exact same value listening to an audio book while doing your normal chores as you would reading it, certain experts even say information sinks in more when we are not paying direct attention to it.

But when did this audio book phenomenon really start? What is the history of audio books? Most people , myself included think that audio books are a very recent invention, right?  WRONG!

It is very easy to assume that audio books are a recent invention because of the mention of CDs, downloadable digital formats, MP3s, PDAs and all the other technological jargon each time audio books are discussed. But audio books started a long time ago. To know how long audio books have been around, we need to understand exactly what audio books are.

Forget about any other jargon you have heard, audio books are simply books that are recorded to be listened to, instead of read. That being said, recordings of books in audio formats have been around for a very long time. In fact they were first introduced over half a century ago. It could even be longer, if you include the Library of Congress recordings made especially for the American Foundation for the Blind and distributed free throughout the U.S.

However, according to Robin Whitten, the editor and founder of the only magazine which is dedicated solely to the audio book industry:
Audiofile--http://www.AudioFileMagazine.com, Caedmon (now a subsidiary of Harper Collins Publishers) can be credited to have started the recordings of literature as far back as 50 years ago.
Caedmon was just a small company way back then in New York, which started recording the audio of great authors and poets of the 1950s. He stated that one of the earliest recordings were by greats such as Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Fitzgerald and Robert Frost. They were simply recorded while doing their own works and made as vinyl records. But these early recordings can pass off for the first collection of audio books ever.

The transition of book recordings into audiocassettes didn't happen until the late 1970s up to the 1980s. From then on, it blossomed until audio books on audiocassette tapes came to be accepted by everyone. However, the audio book phenomenon didn't really kick off until the 1990s, and with the immense popularity of CDs, more people have become interested in audio books.
With the advent of the Internet and its technology, audio books have gone from vinyl records, audiocassettes and CDs into downloadable digital formats that can be listened to with a desktop computer, laptop computer, PDAs , MP3's , IPods etc.
If you are still interested in "going back in time" you can get the original book recordings that started this audio book industry.

Impossible? Not really.

Some of those early 1950s analog recordings by Caedmon which were performed by the greats of their day can be purchased today on the Internet.
For example, browse the Internet thoroughly and you can find the original recording of "The Lord of the Rings" as read by J.R.R. Tolken.

You can find that classic you have always dreamt of in audio book format if you search hard enough on the Internet.

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