An audiobook is a recording of a text being read. It is not necessarily an exact audio version of a book or magazine.
Spoken audio has been available in schools and public libraries and to a lesser extent in music shops since the 1930s. Many spoken word albums were made prior to the age of videocassettes, DVDs, and compact discs, often of plays rather than books. It was not until the 1980s that the medium began to attract book retailers, and then book retailers started displaying audiobooks on bookshelves rather than in separate displays.
Many spoken word recordings of stories were sold on cylinder in the early 1900s.
In 1931, Congress established the talking-book program, which was intended to help blind adults who couldn’t read print. This program was called "Books for the Adult Blind Project." The American Foundation for the Blind developed the first talking books in 1932. One year later the first reproduction machine began the process of mass publishing. In 1933 anthropologist J.P. Harrington drove the length of North America to record oral histories of Native American tribes on aluminum discs using a car battery-powered turntable. Audiobooks preserve the oral tradition of storytelling that J.P. Harrington pursued many years ago. By 1935, after Congress approved free mailings of audio books to blind citizens, Books for the Adult Blind Project was in full operation. In 1992 the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Challenged (NLS) network circulated millions of recorded books to more than 700,000 Physically challenged listeners. All NLS recordings were created by professionals.
Stephen John Fry (born 24 August 1957) is an English actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter, film director, and a director of Norwich City Football Club.
After a troubled childhood and adolescence, during which he was expelled from a number of schools and eventually spent three months in prison for credit card fraud, he was able to secure a place at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he studied English Literature.
He first came to public attention in the 1981 Cambridge Footlights Revue presentation "The Cellar Tapes", which also included Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery. With Hugh Laurie, as the comedy double act Fry and Laurie, he co-wrote and co-starred in A Bit of Fry & Laurie, and took the role of Jeeves (with Laurie playing Wooster) in Jeeves and Wooster.
As an actor, Fry played the lead in the film Wilde, was Melchett in the BBC television series Blackadder, starred as the title character Peter Kingdom in the ITV series Kingdom, has a recurring guest role as Dr. Gordon Wyatt on the Fox crime series Bones and appeared as rogue TV host Gordon Deitrich in the dystopian thriller V For Vendetta. He has also written and presented several documentary series including the 2008 television series Stephen Fry in America, which saw him travelling across all 50 US states. Since 2003 he has been the host of the quiz show QI.
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist and journalist. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language and a belief in democratic socialism.
Considered perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture, Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945), which together have sold more copies than any two books by any other 20th-century author. His book Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, is widely acclaimed, as are his numerous essays on politics, literature, language and culture. In 2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Orwell's influence on popular and political culture endures, and several of his neologisms, along with the term Orwellian—a byword for totalitarian or manipulative social practices—have entered the vernacular.