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The untold story of the talking book / Matthew Rubery

Author
Rubery, Matthew
Published
Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2016.
Copyright Date
©2016
Physical Description
369 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

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Contents
Introduction: What is the history of audiobooks? -- Canned literature -- A talking book in every corner of dark-land -- How to read a talking book -- A free press for the blind -- From shell shock to shellac -- Unrecordable -- Caedmon's third dimension -- Tapeworms -- Audio revolution -- Afterword: Speed listening.
Summary
This work traces the tradition from phonographic books made on wax cylinders to talking books made for blinded soldiers returning from the First World War and, much later, the commercial audiobooks heard today. Addressing the vexed relationship between orality and print, the author shows how talking books developed both as a way of reproducing printed books and as a way of overcoming their limitations. In an overview, he charts the talking book's evolution across numerous media (records, tapes, discs, digital files), its reception by a bemused public, and impassioned disputes over its legitimacy. Testimonials drawn from the archives of charities for war-blinded veterans and pioneering audio publishers, including Caedmon, Books on Tape, and Audible, recreate how audiences over the past century have responded to literature read out loud. This book poses a series of conceptual questions too: What exactly is the relationship between spoken and printed texts? How does the experience of listening to books compare to that of reading them? What influence does a book's narrator have over its reception? What methods of close listening are appropriate to such narratives? What new formal possibilities are opened up by sound recording? Sound technology turns out to be every bit as important as screens to the book's ongoing transformation.
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ISBN
9780674545441 (hardback)
0674545443 (hardback)
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references (pages 279-351) and index.
View MARC record | catkey: 18910129