Publishers Bid Farewell To Books On Tape

New York Times:

There was a funeral the other day in the Midtown offices of Hachette, the book publisher, to mourn the passing of what it called a "dear friend." Nobody had actually died, except for a piece of technology, the cassette tape.

While the cassette was dumped long ago by the music industry, it has lived on among publishers of audio books. Many people prefer cassettes because they make it easy to pick up in the same place where the listener left off, or to rewind in case a certain sentence is missed. For Hachette, however, demand had slowed so much that it released its last book on cassette in June, with "Sail," a novel by James Patterson and Howard Roughan.

The funeral at Hachette -- an office party in the audio-book department -- mirrored the broader demise of cassettes, which gave vinyl a run for its money before being eclipsed by the compact disc. (The CD, too, is in rapid decline, thanks to Internet music stores, but that is a different story.)

Cassettes have limped along for some time, partly because of their usefulness in recording conversations or making a tape of favorite songs, say, for a girlfriend. But sales of portable tape players, which peaked at 18 million in 1994, sank to 480,000 in 2007, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. The group predicts that sales will taper to 86,000 in 2012.

Read the whole story: New York Times

Comments

[mathme]

Ugh. About time. Cassettes were always terrible. They sounded bad, they were fragile, and did I mention that they sounded bad? Sure, you could get expensive "metal" tapes, run them through a very expensive tape deck, and they sounded okay, but it was, as many compact media are, a compromised design. Better than 8-track, not as good as reel-to-reel, easier to handle than other tape technologies and LPs.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those LP snobs, because i think that it's ridiculous to spend thousands of dollars for a turn-table, cartridge, tube pre-amp, and a high end amp just to make them sound almost as good as a CD played through a 35 dollar DVD player. I wish, now that sony has regrettably won the HD media war for now, that they'd push the SACD standard again. Incorporate it into blu-ray player specs and turn more of these out... Hmm... I'm going to listen to some music.

[3fingerbrown]

This just in: Days after the demise of their books on cassette, Hachette has announced the layoff of several monks in their copying department.

[Eric8869]

If we're burying old things - how do we get people to stop writing checks at the grocery store?

[YoMama]

So let's say you need to make a recording and hand the medium containing the recording to another person right then and there without giving them the recording device itself. What can you use if you can't use cassettes anymore (because no one has tape players) and don't want to lug a laptop with microphone and cd's around? Are there portable digital devices with cheap, removable, one-time-use media? Just curious because on-the-fly, exchangeable recordings were a chief advantage of tape players.

[donorman]

Goodbye old friend. She sure was a good ship.

[booker52]

I also use to listen to books on tape. Now I download them free from the library to my MP3 player. Love it!!!

[bija]

I used to listen to books on tape all the time, but once I got an iPod, I rarely ever used a tape. I prefer to get the books on CD and rip them for the iPod.

[lexnekst]

I now listen to books on mp3. How times have changed.

[gwpriester]

When we had a one hour commute to work everyday, Books on Tape made the commute almost a pleasure. Sometimes if we were listening to a really gripping book, we would pass our exit and drive on so as not to have to put down the book.

Of course there were always people on the freeway who like Janice preferred to read the printed word. We would frequently see them in the rear view mirror, driving 65 MPH with the paper or other reading material pressed to the steering wheel. These readers as well as the ladies curling their eyelashes, applying their makeup while chatting on their mobile phones, made the commute interesting. :-O

[marymansour]

Shucks mam, I thought CD's and MP3's had come along. I didn't even know that made tapes anymore.

[FirstShirt]

Not long ago I tried to get a tape player and a cd player in a new car and the young salesman looked at me like I had ordered an 8 track.

This is a good example [showing my age here] of old tech being better than new tech. CD's get scratched, are difficult to store in your car, can break easily and you can't get more than one artist on them. Tapes can be dropped, tossed around by the grandkids, thrown into a storage compartment in the car and then played with the same, God bless them, fidelity. Today you get digital fidelity for music that isn't worth the time.

[MrStill]

I used tapes and cds for a long time listening to books on my commute, but now I listen to books on an MP3 player in my car. It took a little getting used to, but Ive gotten to where I really prefer it. It remembers where I left off and sounds great.

[lewes17266]

I drove recently from Delaware to South Carolina and back again and listened to books on cassette the entire drive. The time passed so quickly.

I got them from my library. There are hundreds of books on cassette still at the library. They really are easier to use than CDs.

[Triangle1]

You mean publishers have still been using cassette tapes? I thought they got rid of those years ago.

[JiminNC]

J ohn Mc Cain just bought a new one for his car.

[poco767b]

It was far more convenient than the phonograph he had in there before.

[marymansour]

Did he have to crank his victrola? LOL!