Detective novels come to life when read by a well-cast, hard-boiled narrator, and the smoky-voiced actresses of Great Britain are kept very busy these days by the demand for erotic audiobooks. Genre fiction can make for great audiobooks. What follows are the three most common pitfalls-and how to avoid them. But too many fine books are still being turned into bad audiobooks worse still, their producers are making the same mistakes over and over. Nowadays, narrators are recruited from the ranks of top-notch voice-over talent, big-name authors, renowned stage actors, and Hollywood stars. The industry came of age in the ‘80s: Sales grew, and the listening experience improved. Soon commuters in their Datsun B210s discovered the time-killing properties of audiobooks. They remained this way through the 1970s, until the gas crisis brought over more fuel-efficient Japanese cars and their standard-issue cassette decks. The result was audiobooks with a vaguely institutional air, employing bland, monotone narrations thought appropriate for the incapacitated. Reed Smoot (he of the arguably Depression-spurring Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act) helped bring forth the Books for the Adult Blind Project-a bit of progressive do-goodery intended to give the gift of literature to the sightless. Today’s recorded book has come a long way from its humble, federal origins. Nearly $1 billion worth were sold last year, meaning 15 percent of all books sold these days are the kind that read themselves. For all the column inches downloaded to Kindles this year about how electronic books will someday replace traditional ones, little has been made of the steady rise of another rival to the printed word: audiobooks.
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