Vinyl Audiobooks Making a Comeback?

Last week, Publisher’s Weekly posted an article announcing HarperAudio’s intention to release audiobooks on vinyl. Their vinyl series kicks off in April with the release of Joe Hill’s short story, “Wild Horses.” This will be followed by the first of Lemony Snicket’s A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS books, and Nikki Giovanni’s LOVE POEMS.

Given the recent resurgence of interest in vinyl, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised someone’s doing vinyl books. But it struck me as a strange marketing decision for a couple of reasons. First, it seems most people get into audiobooks because of their portability. In digital format, they can be played on your phone, or on CD in your car (if you have one of those old cars, like, ten years old or more, that has a CD player instead of an input for your digital device). If you’re really old school, you might have books on tape, and play them on your car’s cassette player, or on your Walkman. However you play them, the selling point is you can listen to books while driving to work, or taking the kids to ballet, or doing your taxes. Vinyl isn’t quite so portable. The discs are large, and you have to use a turntable with a stylus to play them. They did attempt to make in-car turntables in the 1950s and 1960s, but they played only 45s, and weren’t very successful.

Another reason I thought this odd has to do with the length of the books. Most novels run somewhere around 100,000 words, give or take 20-30,000, sometimes more. Gary Corby’s excellent book SACRED GAMES, a mystery set in ancient Athens, is about 350 pages long. The unabridged CD audiobook covers 10 discs, for a total running time of 12 hours and 30 minutes.

Each CD can hold around 78-80 mins of audio. As mp3s, you could put all ten discs on your phone and listen to them without having to change discs. You could even make one huge twelve-and-a-half hour mp3 out of them!

Vinyl’s a bit different. The physical limitations of vinyl are much more significant. If you know how vinyl works, you know that each side of a record has a continuous groove that spirals from the outside in. The stylus (or “needle”) travels down the groove, picking up sounds from indentations in that groove which represent the recorded music. Here’s a video explaining the process in more technical detail:

The spacing of the grooves makes a big difference to audio quality. The wider the grooves, the better the sound quality; the more tightly packed, the sound becomes quieter and noticeably degraded. With optimum groove spacing, you can get about 18-20 minutes of recording time on one side of a 12″ record. Packed as tightly as possible, the limit is about 30 mins of recording time on one side, though, as I said, the quality won’t be as good.

I dug this gem out of my wife’s record collection. It’s an abridged audiobook of THE HOBBIT from 1974:

As you can see, it comes in a box-set. There are four LPs, each an hour long (30 minutes per side). According to the accompanying booklet, the uncut version would have spanned 18 LPs, which was not an economically viable option. So they edited it down to six LPs, and then to four. I have yet to listen to it to find out how much of the story is left. Not a great deal, I imagine, though apparently Tolkien himself gave his consent to the edits.

This is why, I think, HarperAudio’s initial offerings are short stories and poems. It’ll be interesting to see if it catches on, or if it’s just a gimmick.

Your thoughts?