Talking books became audiobooks with the invention of the audiocassette in 1969, the technology's new portability facilitating an audience beyond the visually impaired. The audiobook's origins as an aid for the print-disabled should give us pause in comparing it to print, and remind us of the ways these comparisons can carry ableist presuppositions. We also tend to disregard the usefulness of audiobooks for those who are better able to focus while listening than reading. I begin with this early history of audiobooks, as a service medium for the print disabled, to dismiss out of hand the tired debates about it being a lesser, somehow unintellectual, less rigorous form of reading. Many years would pass before I would connect these insecurities to shame about my disability rather than any shortcomings of the audiobook. Adding to this were enduring doubts that reading with my ears wasn't the same book experience as print. Hill writes,īy sophomore year, I had started dreaming of becoming a writer, a profession fraught with its own strain of impostor syndrome, and every time I wanted to read a book I couldn't get on tape, I felt like even more of a fraud. In his brief history of the form, the visually impaired writer James Tate Hill talks about the importance of the National Library Service in his journey to becoming a book lover and writer despite untreatable vision loss. Near the end of WWII, the New York Public Library's Women Auxiliary developed Recording for the Blind, an organization set up to record textbook passages for veterans who were blinded in the war and attending college on the GI Bill.

The earliest recordings included readings from the Bible, Helen Keller, and Edgar Allan Poe. A decade or so later, in 1931, The American Foundation for the Blind and the Library of Congress Book for the Adult Blind Project established the US's own Talking Book Program designed to serve soldiers who sustained eye injuries in WWI and WWII. Back then the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) tested different ways to produce books for the visually impaired. What we experience as audiobooks today originated in the UK in the 1920s as the talking book.

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