This peculiarly fascinating history takes us from the origins of the talking book, designed to entertain and help to rehabilitate blinded first World War veterans, through to the competitive big business of audiobooks today.
For what might seem a vanilla topic, audiobooks have had their share of controversy. State censorship in deciding what to record was a problem: 1959 requirements ruled out books that were “too harrowing”, had “too much blasphemy” or were “insensitive” in their treatment of blindness, and it was widely judged that romantic interludes were rendered more intimate by being read aloud.
Even today the gender, age, ethnicity and nationality of readers are hot topics of debate, given the extent to which the reader’s voice can change the perception of a text.
The Untold Story of the Talking Book firmly establishes the talking book as an independent creative work of such power that one publisher promised that its recording of Finnegans Wake would make listeners swoon. Who wouldn't download a bit of that for their podcast-saturated commute?
