As I gleefully reported in my previous post, the audio book of Good With Dogs and Cats: The Adventures of Healing Weintraub has debuted along with the handsome paperback. Hurray!
Several readers have inquired about downloading the audio book without having to join Audible. You can! The audio book is also available through Apple Books.
These inquiries got me thinking about the history of audio books.
In the beginning there were no audio books or any books for that matter, or even much paper. People told stories to each other for thousands of years. That was the state of the technology until someone, possibly a woman named Myra, came up with the idea of memorizing stories. Humans had memorized songs, some of them really long songs about hunting antelopes, for thousands of years, so why not stories?
Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey were preserved for generations as memorized texts until some brilliant person, possibly a man named Demetrius, got the idea of writing those scintillating adventures down, in ancient Greek no less.
Fast forward to the invention of LPs, otherwise known as long-playing records. Plays by Shakespeare came out on vinyl and were used ineffectively in public schools. And, of course, many of us grew up listening to the multi-record rendition of Winnie-the-Pooh with an accompanying illustrated book. We knew to turn the page when Winnie sang Rum-tum-tiddle-liddle, rum-tum-tum.
Then came the invention of cassette tape players. A few hundred mega-bestselling books came out in multi-cassette audio book editions. This development ushered in the era of people listening to audio books while driving.
Then came CDs. It still required several CDs to hold several hours of someone narrating a book, and only hugely popular books became audio books. People, while driving, would search desperately through piles of CDs for the one with the best sex scene in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, causing accidents and needless deaths.
Now we are in The Age of Digital Audio Books. At the outset of this age there were several audio book companies. Soon thereafter Amazon/Audible bought all the other audio book companies (except for Apple) and became the primary source for audio books and requires people to join Audible to download audio books. Not so Apple Books.
In related news: E-book editions of Good With Dogs and Cats: The Adventures of Healing Weintraub are coming out even as I post this.
Happy Holidaze!
todd
