AUDIOBOOKS : Abridged vs. Unabridged: The Tale of the Tapes

Whitney Otto tried listening to the audio version of her book “How to Make an American Quilt,” which had been condensed to fit into a three-hour running time.

After 10 minutes, she turned it off.

“It was unlistenable,” she says. “It had logic problems. Certain things would lead into other things that did not make sense.”

Unlike author Otto, however, freeway drivers who consume the latest bestsellers on audiocassette might not realize that the books have been whittled paragraph by paragraph to fit into two- and three-hour spans.

Whether quality gets lost on the cutting-room floor is a debate as old as the $1.4-billion-a-year audiobook industry. Major publishers long have defended edited audio versions of their popular titles, while a small group of producers who specialize in unabridged works argue that it is a cardinal sin to cut a classic to as little as 20% of its original form.

“I don’t read abridged books, and I wouldn’t listen to them either,” says Duvall Hecht, president of Books on Tape, a Newport Beach-based audio producer whose company catalogue of more than 3,000 tapes contains not one title that has been abridged.

His company’s unabridged reading of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” for example, runs more than 16 hours. Durkin Hayes Publishing released an abridged version last fall that runs two hours.

When Hecht started Books on Tape 20 years ago, the unedited format was the norm. Now it’s just a niche.

Far and away, shortened versions make up the bulk of releases among major audiobook publishers. And judging by the unending growth of the business, customers, bookstore owners and librarians have accepted the format. Even authors--yes, authors--have embraced the concept.

“The whole point is not to chop up a book so it fits into a three-hour format,” says John Whitman, editor at Time Warner AudioBooks. “The whole idea is to create a new piece of entertainment.”

Says Seth D. Gershel, publisher of Simon & Schuster Audio: “Nowhere did we say we were trying to put a full book on a cassette. An audiobook is kind of like a movie. I don’t want to see every word of ‘Forrest Gump’ on the screen.”

To publishers, authors’ audiobook horror stories--such as an Agatha Christie novel in which a character suddenly popped into a room without explanation--are the fault of poor abridgers, not the pared-down format.

Time Warner instructs a team of editors to trim a book to about 28,000 words while preserving the plot and the author’s style. “Cut unimportant scenes first,” the company’s guidelines state. Then, editors should trim unnecessary paragraphs from necessary scenes, followed by unnecessary characters from needed scenes. “Paraphrase only as a last resort,” the instructions say.

“You have to have an ear for what sounds good,” Whitman says of the abridging process, which takes about a month for each title. “A lot of abridgers have a background in radio.”

More than anything, the shortened format is driven by cost. An audiobook has to be priced the same as or less than the printed work itself, publishers say. Most of the two- and three-hour books cost $15 to $18. An unabridged book can run $50 or more because of the additional cassettes required. The abridged “Catch-22” sells for $16.99; the full-length version costs $96.

“It’s not something (where) we sat down and said, ‘Oh, good, let’s chop up a book,’ ” Gershel says. “It was a necessary evil to get the running time (down). . . . It’s Economics 101. It’s like if you went to a movie that was 12 or 13 hours. You could charge $30 for the experience, but you wouldn’t get as many people in the theater.”

Not that publishers haven’t been trying. In November, Cathedral Audio Books released the complete recording of Michael Shaara’s Civil War epic “The Killer Angels,” read by actor George Hearn. The 13 1/2-hour production, packaged in a case that looks like a vintage bookshelf classic, has sold 2,500 copies at about $49.95 each.

The company, however, still plans to pare the book to a six-hour version this summer to expand its sales into retailers such as Target and Wal-Mart.

“It’s such a literary book, the abridger felt it was almost sacrilegious,” says Cathedral producer Steven M. Kalb. “But the abridgment is traditionally the bigger market.”

Hecht of Books on Tape says he knew from the start that his company would have a limited market if it tried to sell complete works in retail stores.

“You end up with a little package that looks like a loaf of bread,” he explains. “How in heavens would you sell that in a bookstore?”

So he adopted a direct-marketing approach, publishing a catalogue and directing customers to order by phone or mail. And as an antidote to the high prices--a recent release, “The Alienist” by Caleb Carr, costs $104; Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” at 45 hours, costs $360--the tapes can also be rented at far more modest rates, ranging from $9.95 to $19.50 for one month.

Information Highway Media Corp. of Cupertino, Calif., will offer a potential solution to the bulky tape packages when it launches Listen Up, a service that will transmit audiobooks via cable-TV lines to a small recording device that consumers may buy for their homes. Subscribers can then remove the Walkman- like device and connect it in their cars for listening. Geared strictly for a rental market, the device self-destructs the recorded material after 30 days.

Although all types of audiobooks will be offered, company Vice President Cynthia West says, the service will make full-length recordings much more efficient. With digital compression, about 100 minutes of audio can be stored in the recording device in one minute.

The device will cost about $250, plus a $10 monthly service charge, and won’t make its widespread debut until early next year.

Until then, publishers are limited to the conventional cassette format. When Time Warner releases an unabridged version of “Gone With the Wind” this fall--officials in charge of author Margaret Mitchell’s estate wouldn’t allow the novel to be cut--it will run 45 hours on 30 cassettes, making it among the longest audiobooks geared to the retail market.

“It’s a hell of a big read,” says actress Lynn Redgrave, who read the book. During the 2 1/2 weeks of recording, she had to keep in mind the distinct voices of 76 characters. She took short naps at lunchtime and drank “stacks and stacks of water.”

She predicts that all of the effort will prove worthwhile. The audio version--which has not been priced yet--will do well because many people have never read the book, she says.

“It’s a big investment of time, but people have got that bloody commute,” Redgrave says. “They get awful tired of radio--the news, the music, the shrinks.”

L ike the Mitchell estate, some authors, such as Stephen King, refuse to have their works cut. But many others have no problem with it.

Herman Wouk initially refused to allow trimmed versions of his recent novels “The Hope” and “The Glory.” Audio Renaissance Tapes went ahead and issued complete recordings. “He didn’t sell in the kind of numbers that would normally sell if it was in an abridged (form),” says Audio Renaissance President George Hodgkins.

Yet Wouk grew to accept the idea of the shortened audiotapes and allowed the company to issue a shortened, eight-tape version of “The Hope” last Christmas.

And by last year, so too had Otto, even though she was disappointed by “American Quilt.” She had a better experience with her latest work, “Now You See Her,” read by Blair Brown. She acknowledged that some of the book’s more technical passages on architecture would have turned listeners off had they not been trimmed.

“I could not have done a better job,” she says. “Not a great deal was lost. And I listened to it all the way through.”*