Abstract
This contribution focuses on the relatively new phenomenon of the purely commercial availability of audiobooks, sometimes also called "spoken books", "talking books" or "narrated books". Having the text of a book read aloud and recorded has been for a very long time the favourite solution to make books and other texts accessible for persons with a serious reading impairment such as blindness or low vision. Specialised production centres do exist in most countries of the world for producing these talking books. But now a growing number of commercial groups have found out that there is a booming market for these products as people slowly get used to leisure listening to books instead of reading them. Some companies claim already having over 40.000 titles in spoken format in their catalogue. Major differences and possible synergies between the two worlds are discussed.
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References
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The medium to use is not part of the Daisy standard. The CD-ROM format is described in the Yellow Book, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Book_%28CD-ROM_standards%29
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The Audio CD format Red Book was developed in 1980 by Philips & Sony for high quality music recordings and specifies a maximum playing time of 78 minutes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_%28audio_CD_standard%29
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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Engelen, J. (2008). Modern Digital Libraries, the Case of the Audio-Book Boom. In: Miesenberger, K., Klaus, J., Zagler, W., Karshmer, A. (eds) Computers Helping People with Special Needs. ICCHP 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5105. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70540-6_42
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70540-6_42
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