I thought ths article from the New York times was so interesting that I have published an abridiged version here, interesting times we all alive in.
NEW YORK - On a recent afternoon Laura Wilson was speaking through a microphone to Oliver Wyman, on the other side of a pane of glass. "Just hit 'Samaritan' a little harder," she said.
The two were in a recording studio near Times Square, producing the audio version of The Intellectual Devotional, a book of daily readings by David Kidder and Noah Oppenheim. Wilson, a producer with the Audio Renaissance publishing company, wanted Wyman, the reader, to give the word more stress in a sentence that began, "Ethnic Samaritans, now living in northern Israel."
That same afternoon, in a studio a few blocks away Julie Fain Lawrence, was recording Simply Sexy, a Harlequin title by Carly Phillips.
Kidder and Oppenheim's philosophical musings might appear to have little in common with Phillips' bodice-ripper. But the audiobooks share one trait: They are both being released exclusively in a downloadable format.
When finished next month they will be available only to mouse clickers on Audible.com, one of several Internet sites featuring digital audio versions of books, periodicals and spoken-word content.
Unlike onscreen e-books, downloadable audiobooks have taken off, driven by the explosive popularity of the iPod.
Because of lower production costs, titles that a few years ago would not have had audio versions at all are now being recorded; the decision is based largely on projected hardcover sales. And if they prove popular enough as downloads, some of those productions eventually will be made into three-dimensional audiobooks.
The audio versions of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential and the New Yorker writer Susan Orlean's Orchid Thief were both first available only to downloaders. Only after both hardcovers performed well - Orlean's book was made into a movie (Adaptation), and Bourdain's inspired A Cook's Tour, his celebrity chef show on the Food Network - were both books rolled onto CDs.
In 2002, when Three Junes by Julia Glass was published, "we hadn't originally bought audio rights and we didn't plan to," said Madeline McIntosh, publisher of Random House Audio Group. "Then in the 11th hour, word came through that the book had been selected for the Today show book club and was going to get a lot of visibility."
The publisher scrambled to record the book and put it on Audible. It sold on the site exclusively until a year later, when Random House released a physical version of the audiobook concurrent with the paperback.
With virtually no promotional budgets, audiobook publishers rely on riding the coattails of the print version's publicity, marketing and advertising. So while the success of a download-only title on hear-now-audio-books.com is a factor in determining whether to release a CD, publishers still link that decision more closely to hardcover sales.
Two Penthouse magazine books, Between the Sheets: A Collection of Erotic Bedtime Stories and 26 Nights: A Sexual Adventure, were released in download-only audio versions in 2002. But like the books' temptresses, they have had long legs. Sales remained so brisk that in 2006 Between the Sheets was the bestselling download-only title . Four years after they were first recorded, Random House Audio released both titles on CD.
With seven of the top 10 download-only sellers on some audiobook sites in the erotica genre, the company has been a trailblazer in the category.
"We can tell our children that we helped to spawn the audio erotica industry," Beth Anderson, the publisher of Audible, said with a laugh. "We started it not necessarily because we wanted to be in the erotica business, but because it seemed like a niche that wasn't being filled."
When Audible started nine years ago, "porn" and "sex" were popular Web search terms, even more so than now. So as an Internet company, Audible chose to offer racy titles. It now has hundreds of briskly selling erotica offerings, most available only as downloads, and increasingly geared toward women, including the "Herotica" series edited by the sex guru Susie Bright.
"One of the things that makes erotica sell better for us than other places is that when you're on the subway listening to your iPod, no one knows whether you're listening to The Wall Street Journal or a Penthouse book," Anderson said.
An added advantage: With a book on an iPod, there is nothing to hide under the mattress.
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