Literature on Tape : Audio Books--Fast Food for Mind?

A jogger is on the run. A two-mile course, perhaps, through Central Park, around San Francisco’s Marina District, the Loop in Chicago or down L.A.’s trendy San Vicente Boulevard. “As we know,” best-selling author Andrew Tobias remarks through the spongy foam headphones on the jogger’s tiny portable tape player, “it is awfully tough to find any sort of sure-fire investment. I mean, everybody’s looking for the great way to get rich, and I am too.”

Or a driver is stuck in traffic. It is awful. The freeway is a sea of cars, and a slow ride home in first gear is the best she can hope for. She snaps a cassette into her tape deck, and over her car stereo she hears Alexandra Penney, author of “How to Make Love to a Man,” confide that “women are great worriers when it comes to sex. We wonder, ‘Will he think I have thunder thighs?’ ”

Audio Publishing

In airplanes, automobiles and at the coin laundry--in supermarket lines, on commuter trains, even during rigorous physical workout sessions--a phenomenon known as audio publishing is changing the way America reads.

With cassette tape players present in 85% of all U.S. households, and numbering more than 140 million, the non-music tape market is expected to generate sales of $100 million in 1985--up nearly 50% from 1984. Sixty percent of Americans have tape decks in their cars, and 50% have portable players. Increasingly, books on tape are enabling a highly mobile, fast-tracked and information-starved public to talk in terms of “the best book I ever heard.”

“Audio publishing is so popular today because we are a high- energy, highly mobile society, and because cassettes are so easy to manufacture quickly and distribute,” said Bruno Quinson, president of the general books division at Macmillan, longtime publishers of Berlitz language and travel tapes.

Called a Trend

“I think it’s a trend, industrywide,” said Janice Goldklang at Knopf, whose parent company, Random House, will introduce its Audio Books line in September. “It’s something the public is ready for. People’s time is limited, and it’s easier to spend one hour with a tape than three hours reading a book, and you can get the same basic sensation.”

“The sensation” is precisely what critics charge that these electronic-era incarnations of books convey. For length considerations, most audio books are radically condensed or “adapted” from their original versions, prompting purists to fault them as “Kentucky Fried literature.” Sound Ideas, a line of 12 self-help and how-to audio books to be issued by Simon & Schuster this fall, even bills itself as providing “the essence of a book, the heart of the matter, in less than an hour’s time.”

No less an authority than Jonathan Kozol, author of the widely acclaimed “Illiterate America,” has lamented that audio books threaten America’s already endangered tradition of reading and worries about the consequences of “listening to Mark Twain on headsets.”

But not everyone in audio publishing is troubled by the prospect of being viewed as the literary counterpart of fast food.

“Well, I wouldn’t deny it,” said Mitchell Deutsch, president of 3-year-old Warner Audio Publishing, which is adding about 20 titles a month to its 250-title index of audio books. “It’s fast food in the sense that it’s fast and easy. (But) that doesn’t denigrate the product whatsoever.”

In its earliest days, audio publishing catered to a market that might chafe at being characterized as fast and easy.

Since it started in business 10 years ago with a recording of George Plimpton’s “Paper Lion,” Newport Beach-based Books on Tape Inc. has been attempting to build an unrivaled collection of full-length audio books, many of which never graced a best-seller list, said owners Duvall and Sigrid Hecht. Their 1,500 titles range from “The Winds of War” to “War and Peace” to “The River War,” Winston Churchill’s obscure account of the Battle of Omdurman in Sudan.

One of Books on Tape’s most popular titles is “Walden.” Said Sigrid Hecht: “It’s amusing to think that in the 20th Century we’re driving along in our automobiles listening to ‘Walden.’ ”

“We cater to the absolute upper 5% of the socioeconomic structure,” Duvall Hecht said. The big publishers “are all doing abridgments that they sell through bookstores--they’re all doing ‘Glitz’ and ‘Iacocca’ while we’re doing ‘The River War.’ We’re over here in this meadow cutting tender succulent grass, and they’re over in a field . . . cutting each other’s throats and fighting for shelf space.”

Vary Widely in Cost

Recorded books vary widely in cost. For example, Waldenbooks sells a taped version of “Love” by Leo Buscaglia for $6.95. Caedmon Co. has “Where the Wild Things Are” and other stories by Maurice Sendak, read by actress Tammy Grimes, for $8.98. And a four-cassette abridgment of “The Little Drummer Girl,” read by author John le Carre and produced by Listen For Pleasure, retails for $19.95. Books on Tape’s rental rates range from $8.50 to $16.50 per 30-day period, with discounts for larger orders.

Thousand Oaks resident Robert Murray is not listening to any lightweight mind candy on his 60-minute commute to his job as vice president of corporate communications for Whittaker Corp. in Westwood Village. Murray recently bought a complete recorded version of the Bible, which he figures will take him about 4 1/2 months to hear. “I’m in a great mood when I get to the office,” he said.

Audio publishing began as records, and many in the industry cite Caedmon’s 1952 recording of Dylan Thomas reading his own “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” as the granddaddy of the current push. As technology permitted, language records--such as Macmillan’s Berlitz series and the Living Languages program from Crown Books--were quick to graduate to tape, while, on the fiction front, Books on Tape moved in with recorded tomes that arrived in crates of 12 and 15 tapes.

Companies such as Books on Tape and the smaller Recorded Books of Clinton, Md., strive to preserve the purity of the material by recording the complete book. Besides the unabridged text of a work, Books on Tape, for example, gives the listener critics’ comments lifted from the book’s dust jacket, the author’s dedications and a brief summary of the contents.

“To let the author stand with what he wanted to say, we record every word--even the dirty ones,” Sigrid Hecht said.

But while a company like Books on Tape was steaming along with novels, university lectures and a title index that now fills a soft-bound book, the book industry at large was slower to acknowledge the market potential of audio publishing. Instead, when the publishing giants finally made their grand-scale venture into electronics, it was largely into computer software.

Two years ago at the annual convention of the American Booksellers Assn., “books almost seemed to become secondary to software and electronic publishing, which everybody said was going to save the business,” one vice president at a major New York publishing house recalled. In 1985, this executive observed, “electronic publishing is merely a whisper, and now everybody thinks audio is going to be the great new profit center.”

“Audio was more obvious,” said Esther Margolis, president and publisher of Newmarket Press in New York. “It should have been first, but the industry sort of ignored it, so they went with software, and then they realized that audio was right in front of them.”

For many consumers, and even for many within the publishing community itself, computer software apparently was seen as an expensive, mechanically intimidating way to experience a book. “Software still has a certain fear associated with it,” said Sally Ann Berk of Crown, a publisher that decided software would not be a “judicious” way to expand its market. “It’s like when you were in high school, and you heard the word ‘calculus . ‘ “

By contrast, cassette tape equipment “is non-threatening to the bookseller, writer, retailer and consumer. The hardware is more user-friendly,” said Stuart Applebaum, a vice president at Bantam Books, which will introduce its own Bantam Audio Publishing in early 1986. For audio, Applebaum said, “the technical barrier has not been a serious one.”

The hardware is becoming ubiquitous. “First, you had the proliferation of the Sony Walkman,” said Valeri Cade, president of Simon & Schuster’s audio/video publishing division, which produces the company’s new Sound Ideas line. “Then, when the recession ended, everyone went out and bought new cars, and audio cassettes became standard equipment.”

An increasingly electronic society, Berk said, reflects the fact that “people can’t stand to have quiet moments anymore. Everyone wants information all the time.”

‘You Get Addicted’

Or, as a Sound Ideas promotional cassette suggests, “Think of all the time you spend listening to nothing in particular.” Some of those times, according to the same tape, are “in between the rinse cycle and the spin-dry cycle . . . bumper to bumper on the parkway . . . taking a two-mile run.”

“You get addicted, absolutely addicted,” Duvall Hecht said.

The chance to capture at least part of that market was what prompted tiny Books of the Road in Sebastopol, Calif., to set itself up against some of the publishing giants. “Even though the backbone of the market now is bookstores,” said James Connolly, editorial director of Books of the Road, “we feel there are a lot larger markets, possibly more direct, such as large chains like K mart, or in convenience stores along the interstate highway system.”

Connolly calls audio publishing “definitely a phenomenon of the ‘80s” but denies that it is limited to the so-called Yuppie market--the consumers most associated with fancy cars, elaborate electronic equipment and expensive jogging shoes. “I would say it’s very much across the board,” he said. “We even have a burgeoning senior citizen market--people who may have eye problems and may have a hard time reading.”

And, like most people involved in audio publishing, Connolly hastens to defend the cultural value of his endeavor as being on a par with reading.

“When I became involved in this, I realized I was the archetypal dope,” Connolly said. “I thought, oh, another nail in the coffin of literature, just like TV, another thing that will downgrade the growth of literature. I hadn’t recognized then that literature is not only a written tradition, it’s an oral tradition, and the oral tradition has been around a lot longer than the word. We are read to as children, and that is taken away from us at a very tender age.”

Among audio publishers, book reading is split between actors and the authors themselves.

“We use professionals,” said Deutsch at Warner Audio Publishing. The practice reflects the feeling among many in this business that many authors should be read and not heard. But others trumpet the fact that the actual author of a book is sometimes also the narrator of a taped condensation.

Complements Boom Market

“Can you imagine,” said Knopf’s Janice Goldklang, “listening to John Updike read his own work?”

“Most of our people make their living talking,” said Cade of Simon & Schuster. For these authors and public personalities, audio publishing “is an adventure,” Cade said. “It’s a medium they haven’t worked in.”

But the question is whether listening to books turns people away from reading books. “God, no,” Deutsch said. “First of all, people who would never read at all are suddenly getting involved with valuable information, and literature. I think we are doing a great justice to the book market.”

Macmillan’s Quinson agreed: “The current boom in audio cassettes should be viewed by publishers and the public as a complement to books--not as a threat.”

What’s more, the people who produce Cliffs Cassettes, taped versions of Cliffs Notes, claim that their product actually makes listeners want to become readers. Procrastinating students have long substituted Cliffs Notes for their assigned books, and now many teachers are using Cliffs Cassettes to spark classroom discussions of books, said Jerry Bobrow, executive director of Woodland Hills (Calif.)-based Bobrow Educational Services, which produces the 45-minute tapes in association with Cliffs Notes of Lincoln, Neb.

“The idea of this is to get people interested in reading the classics,” Bobrow said. “There’s no way in 45 minutes that you can replace a book, and we don’t want to try.” Cliffs Cassettes summarize the plot of each work, give some background on the author and the historical setting, raise critical questions about the material and present dramatized scenes performed by actors complete with music and sound effects.

Tapes do seem to bring people into bookstores. “Audio centers” have been installed in nearly all of Waldenbooks’ 1,000 stores. And, acknowledged Neil Sofman, a partner in the three Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books stores in the San Francisco Bay Area: “For a long time we resisted carrying cassettes because we didn’t want to detract from books. But over the years we’ve had enough requests from our regular customers that we’ve started carrying them.”

Sofman said he has reluctantly come to accept a product that seems to appeal particularly to families with children. After all, he said, “I’d rather have them listen to a book than watch it.” And besides, he added, “Some people in our culture need to be excited before they’ll pick up a book. There’s still a fear of books. If they’ve heard Basil Rathbone reading Conan Doyle, maybe they’ll be inclined to pick it up and read it.”

Audio publishers complain that the medium is so new that reviewers, for example, have all but ignored it, thus robbing it of a certain credibility. They lament also that, unlike books, tapes cannot be browsed through in a store. Those who deplore condensations are troubled by the bulky full-length format and potentially prohibitive purchase price that cassette tapes demand.

But still they hail audio publishing as a market on the verge of explosion. Said Deutsch: “I think we haven’t even begun to see the effects of it yet. It’s still in its infancy. We’re looking at the fastest growth area of publishing, period.”

Elizabeth Mehren reported from New York and Nancy Rivera from Los Angeles.