READING. 1. Before you read the following article, could you explain what “an audio book” is?

1. Before you read the following article, could you explain what “an audio book” is?

2. Now, read the article and answer these questions:

· When do people listen to audio books?

· What people do you believe buy them? Why?

BOOKS ON TAPE

by William Scobie and Nick Godway

In the Middle Ages when books were scarce and few people could read, stories were rendered orally. With the introduction of mass education and greater availability of printed material, the oral tradition began to die out. Today’s miniature tape players are, in a way, helping to reverse this trend, as this 1986 article from “The Observer”, a British quality paper, shows.

Behind the wheel of one of the cars rolling bumper to bumper along LA’s smog-choked Hollywood Freeway, a driver is engrossed in a book. It is John Le Carre’s The Little Drummer Girl – only this time it is coming over the car’s stereo cassette player read by Le Carre himself.

A jogger trots along the Pacific waterfront in the city’s trendy Marina district. “Women are great worriers when it comes to sex – we don’t need to be, ” intones author Alexandra Penny through the jogger’s headset. She is reading from her bestseller, How to Make Love to a Man. Another driver, Bob Murray, vice-president of an LA computer company, listens to another bestseller for an hour each morning on the way to his job in LA. It is the Bible, complete on tape.

Welcome to the brave new world of audio publishing, a phenomenon which is changing America’s reading habits. Across the nation, in coin launderettes, supermarket queues, traffic jams, trains, cars and buses Americans are listening to books on tape.

The British have been listening for rather longer and, of course, in a rather more subdued fashion. Michael Turner, managing director of Associated Book Publishers says: “Audio tapes have been sold very successfully in this country for a number of years through the record trade. We see it as part of book exploitation, although we are not going to miss a gap in the market if it occurs.”

ABP has produced a couple of series – including Wind in the Willows in association with Thames Television – and their success has moved them to look at several new projects, including a Tintin series. It has also sold the audio cassette rights on several adult books to Thorn EMI, which specializes in this market under the Listen for Pleasure label. Thorn’s double cassette packs, which W.H. Smith says sell well, include such titles as The Moon is a Balloon, Biggles and 1984.

But it is the US where the market is booming. Last year sales hit $ 100 million – up 50% on 1984. Industry moguls predict annual sales of $ 500 million by the end of the decade.

“It’s the hottest new growth area in this business, ” says an executive with Random House, which brought out its own “audio books” line. “After all there are more than 140 million portable cassette players in American homes today, and 60% of Americans have tape decks in their cars.”

“It’s the wave of the future, ” says Bruno Quinson, a top executive with Macmillan, which puts out Berlitz language and travel tapes. “We are highly mobile, short-on-time, electronic society. People who’d never take four hours reading a book will spend an hour with a tape.”

Or less than an hour: to the distress of some authors, there is a growing trend towards condensation and editing (“adapting” in publishing jargon) of the original work. Simon & Schuster goes so far as to boast, in its blurbs, that its tapes “provide the essence of a book, the heart of the matter, in less than an hour’s time.”

This makes audio books “Kentucky Fried Literature”, the fast food of the publishing industry, in the eyes of academics. Others argue that thousands that would never pick up a book are being introduced to great literature and given access to new field of information by how-to and self-help manuals.