Rubery 2016

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Rubery, Matthew. The Untold Story of the Talking Book. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.

Introduction: what is the history of audiobooks?

"The audiobook's identity has always been defined in relation to print. My accoutn takes us back to the origins of sound-recording technology in order to understand how recorded books have evolved in relation to rpinted ones. It seeks to establish a precise affiliation between teh two media. This stuy's main contention is that the talking book developed both as a way of reproducing the printed book and as a way of overcoming its limitations." (3)

audiobook publishers see audiobooks as BOOK (4)

"Charting the audiobook's reception history turned out to be especially challenging since its readers were even less likely than those of other books to leave behind traces; at least we occasionally find notes scribbled in a page's margins. No such luck with records. The lesson: new media themselves are not always the best guides to their own history." (5)

"The audiobook's remediation of the printed book into an audible format makes it a distinctly modern form of entertainment despite the affinities with traditional storytelling. Today, no one knows what to do with a book that speaks for itself." (7)

loss with transition to audio, but also gain -- Toni Morrison has read all her books aloud because narrators / voice actors weren't getting accent done the way she heard in her heard; song lyrics and foreign languages probably better heard than read for most readers (9)

"Narrators influence a story's reception at a formal level through accent, cadence, emphasis, inflection, pitch, pronunciation, resonacne, tempo, tone, and any eccentricities that stand out. These sonic details matter since, as literary critics never tire of pointing out, reading aloud is itself an act of interpretation." (10)

"Writing a history of recorded books has helped to debunk, for me, at least, the book's privileged standing. It is easy to forget that readers have yearned for alternatives to printed books -- from braile to sound recordings and electronic facsimiles -- practically since they first came off the press." (17)

"Historically, blinc people have been among the most vocal champions and skeptics of recorded books' braille readers in particular have expressed doubts about talking books as a viable form of reading." (19)