Audiocassettes Gaining More Hearers--in So Many Words

I am continuing my studies at SigAlert University.

Having listened to the unabridged “Moby Dick” and “Madame Bovary” while inching along all our scenic freeways, with brief but mind-easing detours into Joan Hickson reading the short stories of Agatha Christie, I am now (somewhat to my own astonishment) listening to Stephen W. Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time.”

Hawking is the British theoretical physicist who has been confined to a wheelchair for 20 years with Lou Gehrig’s disease and who can barely move, but whose agile mind roves easily around the densest theories of the nature of the universe “From the Big Bang to Black Holes,” as his subtitle says.

His book, which seeks to illuminate all these matters for a non-specialist reader who would not know a light-year from a lite-beer, is the year’s least probable nonfiction hit, sitting atop the Los Angeles Times best-seller list again last Sunday, 13 weeks after its first appearance.

The recorded book, unabridged on four cassettes with a running time of six hours, is read--with fine, enthusiastic sureness--by KABC talk-show host Michael Jackson, who is also credited as producer.

The package is an uncommonly swift and venturesome marketing ploy by Michael Viner of Dove Books on Tape. Viner, who says he runs “the world’s smallest conglomerate,” also produces films and miniseries. He started Dove in 1985 and predicts a retail volume of $6 million this year.

One of his strategies is to do what his competitors might well not think of doing. In the present case this meant acquiring the audio rights to Hawking’s engrossing but difficult book ( popularized is a relative word if there ever was one). It traces the whole history of ideas on how the universe came to be. If, of course, there was a beginning, in which case there might be an end. Or, perhaps, not.

Dove’s current list also includes Carrie Fisher reading an abridgement of her book “Postcards From the Edge,” her fictionalized but obviously very personal account of the pressures and insecurities of the acting life, the pressures doubled and redoubled by drugs. It is provocative in its own way.

Paul Scofield continues to read his way through abridgements of Dickens for Dove. Viner believes in the classics as well as late-breaking contemporary works. Richard Thomas reads an abridgement of “The Prince of Tides” in another current release. Scofield also did one of Dove’s best sellers, a reading of Irving Wallace’s novel “The Seventh Secret,” about Hitler’s last days.

Viner’s actress-wife Deborah Raffin produces for Dove, including readings by Julie Andrews of the children’s books she has written.

Dove faltered briefly when its initial distributor, Newman Communications, collapsed. Dove now does its own distribution and also handles the Random House and Simon & Schuster audio titles.

The firm sells, Viner says, to the big three, Walden, B. Dalton and Crown and thus far to some 500 independent booksellers.

“We’re all hoping for the others in the field to do well,” Viner says. “What helps one helps us all.”

The market indeed includes freeway captives like myself, and joggers and the handicapped, the bedridden and the illiterate (Viner cites a recent study suggesting that between 14% and 17% of adult Americans are functionally illiterate).

“Libraries are now becoming a big area for us,” he says, in part because audiocassettes are popular with the elderly.

Audiocassettes of spoken material sell poorly in contrast with music cassettes. Estimates are hard to come by but their annual retail revenues are probably well under a billion dollars a year.

But the trend is in the right direction--up. Like television, FM radio and videocassettes, audiocassettes grow as more people have the equipment on which to enjoy them. The rise of the Walkman-type cassette player (the jogger’s symphony orchestra) and the falling prices for car cassette units have brought joy to the audiocassette trade.

What continues to be astonishing is the range of material now available, from self-help and instruction through the green fields of escapery to something as demanding as the Hawking tapes. But, says Viner, he had pre-orders for 10,000 sets of “A Brief History of Time,” which will retail initially for about $20, rising to $30 after the introductory period. That is not small talk.