The first two titles recorded were Agatha Christie's _The Murder of
Roger Ackroyd_ and Joseph Conrad's _Typhoon_.
"It would take around ten discs to record an entire novel. Special
turntables had to be designed that would play at appropriate speeds."
I assume that would mean a slower speed, but he doesn't say what it was.
I have no idea how long it would take to read an average novel at a
reasonable pace. 12" 78rpm records could carry maybe 5 minutes of music
on a side; if two-sided, 10 discs would then be about 1 hour 40 mins. (I
used to have a recording of Bach's B minor Mass on 78s, and the number
of discs relative to performance time is in the right ballpark.)
Anyhow, Wikipedia has a much fuller account of the whole thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiobook
For a start, the Americans were a bit earlier -- American Foundation for
the Blind/ Library of Congress "Books for the Adult Blind" project,
starting in 1931. Both the British and American initiatives were in
response to many soldiers who had been blinded in the Great War, some of
whom for various reasons were unable to learn Braille.
Then, once you start going back, you realize that there were bits of
poetry being recorded from the very infancy of the phonograph -- from
Edison's "Mary had a little lamb" on. Here's one of Tennyson doing the
"Light Brigade" in 1890 onto a wax cylinder. (Note: The audio is real;
the image is a "virtual movie", not actual cinema but an animated
photograph.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkqUq26z1CE
or maybe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zBfwYCILTk
From there on the story is: technical improvements in recording expand
the range of possibilities for "talking books": 33 1/3 rpm LP records
from 1948 (and at some point the 16 2/3 speed, never popular with
consumers, but made it possible to put a whole radio program on one
side); cassettes from 1960-ish; and since the 1980s various digital
formats. There's now an industry, and in 1994 they made "audiobook" the official generic term. (I always liked the name "talking book" -- Stevie
Wonder made it an album title in 1972.)
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