I am considering making an audiotape of Footprints in the Dew….
Welcome back. I spent the past weekend doing a book signing in Kansas City at the largest gun show in the state which was held at the KCI Expo Center at the airport which is a place I wrote about a few weeks ago. It was great fun and the attractions in Kansas City are hard to beat. Of course, baseball is big this time of year but the city also offers great architecture some excellent museums and top of the line restaurants and shopping.
While I’ve been traveling over the last few weeks I also got the opportunity to work on another project. I have been planning another book but many people have suggested that I look into making an audiobook of Footprints in the Dew.
Not being familiar with audiobooks, I naturally did some research to find out more about them and what is required to produce one. The websites Silksoundbooks.com and Wikipedia both had plenty of information on the topic.
The first “talking book” as it was called was created in the United States during the 1930s when the Library of Congress started a project called “Books for the Adult Blind Project” in 1934. Excerpts from the Bible and writings by Helen Keller were made available on long playing phonograph records. Throughout the 1930s this was the technology of choice for recordings made by both the Royal National Institute for the Blind in Great Britain and the American Foundation for the Blind in the United States.
In 1949 both organizations began using magnetic tapes for their recordings but these tapes had to be loaded and threaded into the specially designed players which was difficult for blind people. Fortunately, the introduction of audiocassette tapes which were immediately adopted by the National Library Service for the Blind in the U.S. removed this barrier. These tapes became widely popular with sighted people as well and publishers began issuing spoken word versions of their books along with printed editions. It wasn’t long before public libraries in the U.S. and the U.K. purchased the tapes making them easily accessible.
In the 1990s the availability of audiobooks on CDs increased their popularity and tens of thousands of recordings were made. I found that today virtually every bestselling book has been recorded. Most of these recording are “abridged” or reduced versions because usually a recording of the full text requires many CDs.
Most recently, the advent of the internet has made audiobooks available by download to devices such as MP3 players, Smartphones and tablets. Audible.com which was founded in 1998 was the first website dedicated to selling digital audiobooks and is still a leader in the industry.
In 2005 Librivox was established in Canada with the goal of making digital audiobooks available for free and they currently have thousands of titles available for download.
Typically, the production of an audiobook consists of a narrator sitting in a recording booth reading the text while an engineer and a director record and direct the reading. If a mistake is made, the recording is stopped and the narrator reads it again. With recent advancements in recording technology, many audiobooks are now produced in home studios by narrators who work independently. An audiobook would make Footprints in the Dew accessible to more people and I’ll keep you posted on my progress.
Coming up this week for me its OKC today, Tulsa on Thursday and then onto Springfield, MO where I’ll be hanging out at tradeshow designed for a group of people called “preppers”. These folks believe in preparing themselves to live off the grid in case of a manmade or natural disaster. The show will offer all kinds of survival gear such as gas masks, water purification systems and body armor. The show itself is called “the Springfield Prepper and Green Living Expo. It should be interesting.
Till next time, I’ll see ya down the road….
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