Audio Books
BookMouth.com is your premier source for information regarding bestselling books, genres of literature and audio books. Audio books are recordings of the texts of books being read aloud by either the author or an actor. These recordings are not necessarily verbatim (they are sometimes edited, censored or abridged) and they differ from books because of the added performance element. Good audio books need to not only start with a compelling text but also need to be read clearly, emphatically and with a dramatic flourish. In fact, there are awards known as the Audie Awards given out annually to the audio books with the best reading performance.
Although recordings of text have been around since the advent of recording processes, audio books did not become widely popular until the 1980s. Prior to this, recordings of books being read aloud were reserved primarily for use by the disabled. Now, however, audio books are popular in the form of cassettes, compact discs or MP3 recordings and they are used by millions of people who simply can’t find the time to sit down and read a book. Instead, having a recording of a book allows readers (or listeners) to catch up on their “reading” while they plug away on the computer at work, clean the house or drive the kids to and from school.
Most audio books are published by the book publisher who owns the rights to the original text. Sometimes these rights are limitedly sold to the producer of recordings; BBC, for example, publishes more audio books than paper books and they have been largely responsible for the serialization of book recordings. As digital media is becoming the standardized form in which texts are published, almost every book has an audio recording format and/or a digital copy of the text that can be read on devices like Apple’s iPad, Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes and Noble’s Nook. The digitization of media has increased the popularity of book recordings almost tenfold. Ten years ago, books in audio format were extraordinarily expensive and were primarily used by people who borrowed them from the library, where popular bestsellers’ recordings were often on waiting lists that were weeks long. Now, however, consumers can buy inexpensive recordings off of file downloading hubs like iTunes and can upload them to their phone or portable MP3 player. Given the fast-paced mentality of today’s Western world, having digitized readings of popular books has become an asset to readers, especially students, everywhere because it doesn’t require stopping their workdays to read a book by hand. As audio recordings of text become more popular, readership increases exponentially. For more information regarding digital media and the different forms in which books come, check out BookMouth.com.