Audiobook

A recording of a book or other work being read aloud to the listener is known as an audiobook (sometimes called a talking book). A reading of the whole book is referred to as a "unabridged" reading, whilst readings of shorter versions are referred to as "abridgements."

Since the 1930s, spoken audio has been made accessible in classrooms, public libraries, and to a lesser degree, music stores. Before the advent of cassettes, compact discs, and digital audio, a great number of spoken word albums were recorded, most of which were composed of poetry and plays rather than novels. It wasn't until the 1980s that the medium started to attract book merchants, and after that, book shops started putting audiobooks on bookshelves rather than in separate displays since bookshelves were already taking up so much space.

Thomas Edison's creation of the phonograph in 1877 made it feasible for the first time for people to record themselves reading or speaking. Edison's first idea for an application that would "talk to blind people without effort on their behalf" was "phonographic books," and it was one of the first applications he envisioned. Edison's recital of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was the first instance of recorded poetry, and it was the first words uttered into the phonograph by the inventor. In 1878, a performance at Britain's Royal Institution included "Hey Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle" along with a line of Tennyson's poetry. This helped to establish, from the very beginning of the technology's history, its relationship with spoken literature.

The word "talking book" was used in the 1930s in reference to government-sponsored reading programmes for visually impaired individuals, while the term "audiobook" was coined in the 1970s in reference to the gradual phase-out of phonograph records in favour of audiocassettes. The Audio Publishers Association formalised the use of the word "audiobook" as the de facto standard for the industry in the year 1994.