from the SACATE list

Below are two articles on the death of audiobooks on cassette-a short one from Cinema Retro.com, then a long one from the New York Times.

 

R.I.P: THE AUDIO BOOK ON CASSETTE IS NOW GONE WITH THE WIND

 

It had a glorious run and was as resilient as those stalwart defenders of The Alamo, but ultimately it was just as doomed. The audio book cassette is now

virtually finished with the last major publishing house ceasing manufacture of the item that was a byproduct of the portable music revolution that began

in the late 1970s when the Sony Walkman allowed consumers to listen to their own music while on the go. Amazingly, the market has lasted to now even though

the cassette originally fell victim to the CD and now music downloads. Still, the audio book had a small but loyal following that cites the advantage of

being able to stop the cassette at a certain point and resume playing it at the exact same point- something that isn't as easily manageable on CDs. Libraries

remain the biggest buyer of the cassette format but sales there are slowing as well. Ironically, although vinyl is making a big comeback with record lovers,

industry pundits predict no such happy ending for the cassette which, they say, lacks "sex appeal". Thus, it's destined to be the Rory Calhoun of the audio

industry: popular for a while, but ultimately forgettable.

 

Say So Long to an Old Companion - Cassette Tapes - NYTimes.com

By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN

Published: July 28, 2008

 

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.

 

"I bet you would be hard pressed to find a household in the U.S. that doesn't have at least a couple cassette tapes hanging around," said Shawn DuBravac,

an economist with the Consumer Electronics Association. Even if publishers of music and audio books stopped using cassettes entirely, people would still

shop for tape players because of "the huge libraries of legacy content consumers have kept," he said.

 

As long as people keep mix tapes from a high-school sweetheart up in the attic, Mr. DuBravac said, there will still be the urge to hear them. "People have

a tremendous amount of installed content and an innate curiosity when coming across a box of tapes to say, 'Hey, what's on these?' " he said.

 

The tapes started to really take off in 1979, the year that a radical new cassette player - the Sony Walkman - was introduced, enabling people to listen to Donna Summer and the Knack's "My Sharona" while they were jogging (remember jogging?). The heft

of the early Walkman - slightly smaller and lighter than a brick - is comical by today's wispyiPod standards, but during the Carter administration it seemed sleek.

 

Nowadays, listening to music on cassettes is a dying pastime. None of Billboard's Top 10 albums last week were issued on cassette, though half were released

on vinyl, which has been resurging. Last year, only 400,000 music tapes were sold, representing one-tenth of 1 percent of all physical and digital music

sales, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. In 1997, the figure was 173 million, and that was when cassettes were already getting a drubbing by CDs. (The iPod wasn't introduced until 2001.)

 

"I would not expect to see a revival of cassettes like we've seen in the LP market," Mr. DuBravac said. While vinyl records have always been prized artifacts

for their devotees, the plastic cassette tape has little sex appeal.

 

Such was the case for the eight-track format as well, which was popular in the late 1960s and '70s. It died relatively quickly with the advent of cassettes

because eight-tracks were not widely used for personal recording or mix tapes, Mr. DuBravac said. 

 

While the chances of finding cassette players in a dorm room today are slim, they are still available for sale: onAmazon , Sony alone offers 23 tape players, from the Walkman to boomboxes.

 

Popping a cassette in the car tape deck is also passé. Only 4 percent of vehicles sold in the United States during the 2007 model year had factory-installed

cassette players, according to Ward's Automotive Yearbook. As recently as the 2005 model year, 23 percent of vehicles had them.

 

Given that the median age of a car in the United States is nine years old, said Alan K. Binder, the editor of Ward's yearbook, it is most likely that the

majority of the 200 million cars and light trucks on America's roads have cassette players (though how many have had the same Bob Seger tape lodged unplayable

in them for 11 years is impossible to determine). 

 

Cassette tapes' tendency to hiss - and to melt in the summer and snap in the winter - turns off audiophiles. But for audio books, the cassette is an oddly

elegant medium: you can eject it from your car, carry it home and stick it in a boombox, and it will pick up in the same place, an analog feat beyond the

ability of the CD.

 

Cassettes accounted for 7 percent of all sales in the $923 million audio-book industry in 2006, the latest year for which data is available, according to

the Audio Publishers Association. While many publishers, like 

Random House and Macmillan, stopped producing books on cassette in the last couple of years, there are holdouts.

 

At Blackstone Audio, which produces cassette versions of its roughly 340 annual titles, Josh Stanton, the executive vice president, said there was still

demand from libraries and truckers, who buy them at truck stops. But he could forecast only that his company would produce cassettes through 2009.

 

Recorded Books, whose authors include Philip Roth and Jodi Picoult, still issues cassettes of all its titles, roughly 700 a year. Retailers like Borders and 

Barnes & Noble have essentially stopped ordering them, but libraries have been slower to abandon them, said Brian Downing, the company's publisher. 

 

The Web sites of Barnes & Noble and Borders, however, indicate that they still offer some cassettes, though publishers say the stores' buyers have expressed

little interest in ordering more in the future. 

 

At some point, the cassette will go the way of the eight-track, Mr. Downing acknowledged, and his company will publish only in other formats.

 

"I would guess it would be pretty much gone in three years," he said. 

 

Posted by Wesley Britton
WWW.Spywise.net


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