Books: Heard Any Good Books Lately?

“You could drive from here to California on a Dickens,” claims Jeanne Sullivan, a librarian in Oak Park, Ill. The point is well taken; the library’s copy of David Copperfield is 22 cassettes long. Says Birmingham Photographer Mike Clemmer: “I haven’t made any long car trips, but when I do, I’ll buy a book on tape. No more lousy radio music or CB chatter for me.” Lynn Kirk, a real estate investor from Ojai, Calif., admits, “I am definitely addicted to books on tape. I cannot get into my car without them. There are no commercials, you can listen to whatever you want, and it offers a little self-improvement.” And Chuck Russell, an Atlanta management consultant, testifies, “I’ve heard so many books that I would never have read otherwise. One of them was War and Peace: about 50 tapes. It took two months, but it was worth it.”

“Tell me a story” used to be the plea of childhood. It is rapidly becoming the demand of adults. In bookstores across the U.S., literature is assuming a different shape. In addition to traditional clothbound editions and paperbacks, books now lie coiled in little boxes, ready to unspool and speak to anyone with $7.95 and a tape player.

The list of recorded volumes, now some 12,000 titles long, is as wide as a library. Some are only one tape: about an hour and a half. Others can go on for days. Listeners can wander from Hamlet and Moby Dick to Tough Marriage and Eat to Succeed. Although fiction is the most beguiling, self-help books are in greatest demand: The One Minute Manager, In Search of Excellence, 21 Days to Stop Smoking. On occasion, more calorific titles come into earshot: Totally Lewd Limericks, How to Make Love to a Man (prefaced by the warning “This tape contains explicit and graphic language which may be considered offensive”). The voices on the talking books may be stars, such as Michael York (Anna Karenina), Michael Learned (The Scarlet Letter) and Jason Robards (Anatomy of an Illness), or such authors as Ann Beattie, John Updike and Eudora Welty, reading from their own works. Even Lee Iacocca, Rosalynn Carter and Mike Wallace have recently gone from the word processor to the microphone. It is as ^ if, after decades of attention to the eye in TV, films and videocassettes, the ear has been rediscovered.

“No question about it,” says Valeri Cade, president of the audio-and- video publishing division of Simon & Schuster, “there is a big future for books on tape. We’ve doubled the number of accounts every six months, when we come out with a new list.” Agrees Mitchell Deutsch, president of Warner Audio Publishing: “There is a mass market out there. I’m predicting that we will see a 50% to 100% growth in the next five years. It is a fabulous, exciting new development in publishing.”

Not all print publishers are so sanguine. One longtime editor believes, “Every dollar spent on tapes is taken away from the essence of literacy — the printed book that started it all.” Peter Israel, president of the Putnam Publishing Group, Inc., dismisses talking books as a “fad, certainly, but I’m not sure it’s a real business.” But those who have made a commitment to electronic literature beg to differ. Newman Communications Corp., one of the fastest-growing tape publishers in the U.S., began in 1981 with sales of less than $200,000, which leaped to more than $7 million three years later. “We’re not dealing with a Hula-Hoop phenomenon,” says its president, Harold J. Newman. “The underlying base of the business continues to grow every year, and bookstores continue to dedicate more space to books on cassette.” Another successful producer, Listen for Pleasure, also refuses to heed the Cassandras. “At first no one understood what we were selling,” says Vice President Eileen Rundell. “They thought it was a product for the blind. But now we project earnings of from $10 million to $12 million this year, more than 17 times the first-year volume.”

The booster spirit is backed by other encouraging figures. Most Warner cassettes contain a questionnaire asking the consumer for personal information, preferences and tastes; last year 200,000 responses were returned. They form the first profile of an audio market that according to computer projections, will yield industry-wide sales of more than $250 million in 1986. After all, analysts point out, most new-car manufacturers offer the option of a tape deck, and Walkman-style cassette players have become as much a part of the urban landscape as Reeboks and Perrier. Each tape deck and set of earphones represents a potential customer, a statistic that is not lost on Frank Vertuca, associate director of marketing and distribution at Bantam. “A major part of our market is middle class,” he finds. These people are “well off, earn a minimum of $35,000 a year, are between the ages of 25 and 54 and are about evenly divided between female and male. A large number of them buy the tapes to listen to while commuting.”

What they used to hear was a single voice lifting the words from the page, and many novels and short stories are still recorded plain, unadorned by music or echo chambers. But the tape of Stephen King’s The Mist is enhanced by what Simon & Schuster calls 3-D sound: voices are accompanied by rustling leaves, slithering tentacles, the flapping of prehistoric winds and the crawling of spiders as they descend on a small New England town. The latest Warner tapes are described by Deutsch as a “new version of old-time radio,” complete with scores and sounds. Chaim Potok’s The Chosen (Warner), read by Eli Wallach, is augmented by news broadcasts, crowd noises and mood music; Louis L’Amour’s A Trail to the West (Bantam) features hoofbeats and gunshots reminiscent of a 1940s Lone Ranger episode.

Perhaps the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for books on cassettes are authors and actors. For one thing, the tapes are a fresh source of income: royalties for the writer and as much as $4,000 per project for the professional reader. But there is an aesthetic challenge as well. Says Actor David Purdham, who has recorded some 30 authors, from William F. Buckley Jr. to Taylor Caldwell: “You do all the characters. You use different accents. I’ve been Eisenhower and Khrushchev. It’s reviving what I call the theater of the mind.” Actress Glenn Close, who has recorded the children’s book Sarah, Plain and Tall, concurs, “I find it challenging. You have to play five or six different parts, and you have to give a real sense of storytelling. I was raised by a mother who read to us every night. I cherish the memory of her voice. In recording Patricia MacLachlan’s work, I believe I am keeping alive a good tradition.” Updike is both a recorder of his own work and an avid listener to colleagues: “I love to hear authors themselves reading their work. The voice, one presumes, is the voice they are hearing in their heads as they write.”

The craze for recorded literature has given work to yet another needy group: agents. “Everyone is making a concerted effort to secure audio rights because they can earn considerable income,” reports Albert Zuckerman, president of Writers House, Inc. “We just got a $10,000 royalty check for the audio sales of On Wings of Eagles by Ken Follett, and a $35,000 advance for Buck Rodgers’ The IBM Way.” Producer Linda Morgenstern of Caedmon notes “the scuffle” between agent and publisher for audio rights: “There was such a slim market before, but now everyone recognizes that there is a lot of money to be made.”

To that end, Random House routinely demands permission from writers “to license mechanical rights.” Simon & Schuster, among other print publishers, offers a defined structure to its authors, based on percentage of retail cassette sales: 5% on the first 10,000 units sold, 6% on the next 5,000, 6.5% thereafter. Those figures are not frozen; tape publishing is about to make its own rules. Predicts Jane Friedman of Random House: “The issue today, ultimately, is that the publisher wants to retain all audio rights, but as in any contract, every point, every clause is up for negotiation. A publisher simply can’t write its own ticket.” Not yet, anyway. But recently, at the convention of the American Booksellers Association in New Orleans, efforts were made to create the Audio Publishers Association. Eight firms have signed up. Rundell, a member of the new steering committee, has no doubts about the future. In the firm tones of a cassette recording, she maintains, “The outlook is very positive, very upbeat. We’re here to stay. You can’t get rid of us now.”