Listening To Audio Books: Yesterday And Today

I am sure that you have heard that listening to something when you are sleeping, increases your chances of retaining that information.

That can be true, because when you are sleeping (or otherwise not really paying attention to what you are hearing), your subconscious is doing the work of taking in the information. Your conscious mind knows right from wrong and files information into different categories. However, your subconscious is completely different. It will take in the information no matter what is right or wrong.

A large number of people believe that the audio book was a very recent invention, but it is not! The Royal National Institute For The Blind created the first audio book in the 1920s. They were listened to on those old record players that you might see in a museum. They have a large horn and a crank handle. Back then, you had to turn the handle in order for the record player to be played and listened to. The audio book has come a long way since then.

You can now listen to audio books on CDs, MP3s, on your PDA and more. You can download an audio book and pay for it on the Internet in as little as a few minutes.

So, what exactly is an audio book?

Well, in the most simplest of explanations, audio books are just books that are meant to be listened to instead of read. Someone has to record his or her voice in a studio in order to create an audio book.

Audio books have been around for a very long time, first introduced in England in the 1920s! However, if we go even further back in time, there were audio books created by the Library of Congress in the United States. The Library of Congress was specifically created for the American Foundation for the Blind. Those audio books were distributed free of cost throughout the United States.

Believe it or not, there is one magazine published that particularly focuses on the audio book industry Audiofile, with Robin Whitten as the Founder and Editor of the magazine. According to Robin Whitten, Caedmon, which is now a subsidiary of Harper Collins Publishers,can be credited with having started the recording of literature as far back as fifty years ago.

Caedmon was a small business in New York that began recording the audio of authors and poets in the 1950s. Some of the most popular recordings at the Caedmon were of Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Fitzgerald, and others. In Caedmon, these authors recorded their own pieces of work and created records to be played. The precise history of the audio book can be argued and is a little controversial.

Of course, records turned into audio book cassette tapes during the sixties, seventies and eighties. However, the audio book gained popularity in the 1990s more than ever.

With the convenience and ease of the Internet, audio books have come a long way, from LPs, records and cassettes to CDs, MP3s, and PDAs. However, you do not have to listen to recently recorded audio books just because the formats have greatly changed over time. You can find and listen to old versions of audio books, even some of the first audio books ever created!

Copyright: Helen Wall