Birth of Audio Books

We may trace the evolution of audio books to many sources. One of them was the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. The NLS had been producing and issuing on audio cassettes, magazines which reached subscribers by mail. The range of interests represented were Analog Science Fiction, Ebony, Smart Computing, National Review, Sports Illustrated, Cricket, the New York Times Book Review, and magazines in Spanish, French, and German.

Then around the year 2002, their engineering group began to demonstrate the capability of digital audio technology. NLS realized that it might be able to make use of these features to deliver digital versions of magazines to program users. The magazine program offered the right combination of relatively small audio files, the need for direct, timely delivery to users, and an existing delivery system -- the web.

            NLS's massive decade-long experiment and exploration for transition to digital technology finally led to a full-time, full-scale Internet delivery system. John Bryant, head of NLS's Production Control Section, who directed the effort, had said "we plan to use web delivery of human-voice audio magazines to test the use of the ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2002 standard to learn more about digital audio delivery in preparation for the

more challenging audio books, with significantly larger files, that we will be producing in the future." The standard in question, recently adopted by the National Information Standards Organization and the American National Standards Institute, defines the format and content of the electronic file set by which a digital talking book is organized