Everybody seems to listen to audiobooks these days. As a recent marketing campaign put it, “Listening is the new reading.”1 What was once a niche entertainment has grown into a billion-dollar industry thanks to the emergence of digital media, smartphones, and an online marketplace that makes it simple to download just about any title you want. Listening to a book is not the hassle it once was. (Take it from someone who remembers fumbling with cassette tapes while trying to steer a car.) The mainstreaming of audiobooks has been one of the twenty-first-century publishing industry’s greatest success stories.
That success would have come as no surprise to the audiobook’s pioneers, who had always imagined a future in which audiences would read books with their ears instead of their eyes. Fans have been predicting the audiobook’s ascendance ever since it became possible to record books. But when exactly was that? The audiobook’s origins can be traced back further than most people realize. Some historians credit Books on Tape, Recorded Books, and other mail-order libraries that arose in the 1970s to entertain commuters stuck in traffic. Others point toward the 1950s, when Caedmon Records released an album featuring the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas reading his beloved tale “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” Still others link the audiobook’s origins to discs made by the Library of Congress in 1934 for people who were blind and partially sighted. But the audiobook’s origins predate the twentieth century. In fact, the audiobook turns out to be as old as sound-recording technology itself.
There was no way to preserve sounds before the nineteenth century. Speeches, songs, and soliloquies all vanished moments after leaving the lips. That situation changed in 1877, when Thomas Edison began working on a machine that could mechanically reproduce the human voice. Edison’s team successfully assembled a device on which Edison recorded “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” a nursery rhyme that would become the first words ever spoken by the phonograph.2 Depending on how you define the term, Edison’s inaugural recording of verse might be considered the world’s first audiobook.
The spoken word featured prominently at public demonstrations of Edison’s tinfoil phonograph throughout the United States and Europe. Although no recordings were made of these exhibitions, press reports enable us to reconstruct what took place.3 A typical demonstration began with an explanation of how the machine worked, followed by displays of recording and playback. The program opened with a greeting from the phonograph (“The phonograph presents its compliments to the audience”) before moving on to recitations, songs, music, and random noises. Members of the audience were sometimes given a chance to speak into the phonograph before leaving with torn-off slips from the tinfoil recording sheet as souvenirs.