Audiobooks are more popular than ever; Harry Potter is just one reason

NEW YORK

In a tiny studio around the corner from and 11 stories above Times Square, Judy Kaye is reading in a darkened recording booth. • Kaye's four-decade career as a singer and actor has included Broadway roles in Ragtime and Mamma Mia!, but today she's a cast of one. • Dressed in a casual shirt over jeans, with big headphones scrunching her dark hair, she's reading a scene from U Is for Undertow, the 21st in author Sue Grafton's "alphabet series" about Southern California private investigator Kinsey Millhone. Random House Audio Listening Library's version will be released simultaneously with the print edition in December. • Director John Wager and an engineer listen intently and read along from their own copies of the book on the other side of the booth's window. Kaye reads an exchange between two male characters, altering her voice subtly to distinguish between them, often reading a line several times with slightly different phrasing. Sometimes the director interrupts when she skips or mispronounces a word; more often she catches herself. • She has performed all of the audiobooks of Grafton's series, which is set in the 1980s. "It's been a really wonderful ongoing association." • "What I really like," Kaye says, "is that I was at UCLA in the '60s, a young actress in Southern California in the '70s. I have a real sense memory of that place and time she writes about."

Not far away, in Hell's Kitchen, in a bigger, sleeker studio, author Augusten Burroughs is in another sound booth, performing his upcoming book, You Better Not Cry.

Robert Van Kolken, a director and producer for Macmillan Audio, says, "It's a Christmas book, but not a read-around-the-fire-with-the-family Christmas book."

If you're not familiar with Burroughs' earlier audacious memoirs — Running With Scissors, Possible Side Effects, A Wolf at the Table — the book's jacket is a hint at its tone: an image of a man in a Santa suit, seen from behind, holding his coat open like a flasher.

Burroughs, wearing a ball cap and a cream-colored bowling shirt, fiddles constantly with a pack of nicotine gum. He reads dramatically, performing a chapter in which he recalls himself as a boy seeing in a magazine a "gumdrop-bejeweled gingerbread house" and attempting to bake and build it as his parents slept. It does not end well, but the story is uproariously funny.

He pours himself into it, shifting among different voices, making faces, emphasizing every word. He's telling the story with such immediacy he's not actually reading it from the pages before him — his eyes are squeezed shut much of the time. "You can tell," Van Kolken says, "he's imagining everything."

In another scene, the young Augusten's father is telling him a story about a chimpanzee. Burroughs stops in mid sentence, fires off a short volley of expletives, mutters, "That's not my father's voice," and begins again.

• • •

"When I started doing this 13 years ago," says Dan Zitt, a producer for Random House Audio, "nobody knew what it was.

"I'd tell people I produced audiobooks, and they'd say, 'Oh, like for the blind?' "

Audiobooks are a boon for the visually impaired, but their audience these days is much wider, and growing.

Reading books aloud is a tradition as old as books themselves, of course. Before the invention of recording and broadcast technology, families often gathered to take turns reading aloud for an evening's entertainment.

But recorded books date back as far as recording itself — Thomas Edison proposed them in 1878, when he introduced his first "speaking phonograph" (although he saw them only as a service to the blind).

Many baby boomers can recall an elementary school teacher reverently putting an LP on a turntable so kids could hear Dylan Thomas sonorously read his poems and his short story A Child's Christmas in Wales. The LP, recorded in 1952 by Caedmon Records, was one of the first widely circulated recorded books. But music so dominated the recording industry that books remained an afterthought, and vinyl records, which had limited capacity, were a poor medium for full-length books.

That began to change in the past decade or so, thanks to cars, new recording technology and Harry Potter.

Although gas prices and the economy have reined in drive time somewhat, we spend a lot of time in our cars. The Census Bureau estimates the average American spends 100 hours a year commuting to and from work — and that doesn't count errands, family chauffeur duty or vacations.

With sophisticated audio equipment becoming near-standard in our cars — or clipped to our clothes — we expect to be entertained while we drive, and for many people audiobooks have become the option of choice. According to the Web site of the Audio Publishers Association, an industry organization, the No. 1 location for listening to them is the car.

Audiobooks on CD are often more expensive than the hardcover printed book, and the thrifty have sought them at libraries, where growth in their circulation has outpaced circulation overall. But now downloadable audiobooks are widely available for a lower price point, often about $10 to $20 — not bad for six hours or more of diversion.

What's Harry Potter got to do with it? Think boy wizard in a minivan. J.K. Rowling's seven books about Harry, beloved by kids and their parents, broke all records for audiobook sales, with more than 5 million units sold. Once families enjoyed those audiobooks, it opened the door for them to try others.

• • •

For years, the release of an audiobook often lagged behind the print version, sometimes for months. That's changed, Random House Audio publicist Nicole Kuritsky says. "The ideal is to release them together."

That means audiobooks are often produced on a tight schedule, since they can't be recorded until the edited version of the book is available.

Zitt, the Random House Audio producer, says the process begins with the producer reading the book and thinking about who should perform it. "I'm the liaison between the author and the process."

Some authors, like Burroughs, read their own work successfully. Almost always, those works are nonfiction or memoir. "With fiction, it hardly ever works," Zitt says.

But authors often have good ideas about who should read their work. Zitt says one of the easiest collaborations he has ever had was producing the audiobook of Elmore Leonard's Pagan Babies. "I read it and I knew almost from the start who I thought should read it. So I called Elmore and told him I had an idea, but I wanted to hear what he thought first.

" 'Well,' he said, 'the whole time I was writing it I was thinking of Steve Buscemi.' And I said, yes!" Buscemi was hired and turned in a superb performance.

Reading an audiobook is harder work than many authors (and listeners) think. Performing a novel means creating a range of voices for different characters — and keeping them straight. Zitt says that actor Jim Dale, the acclaimed reader of the Harry Potter books, brings his own recorder into the studio to keep track of the hundreds of voices he has created, for those books and many others, in a database.

"A lot of actors really like to do audiobooks," Zitt says. "They say, I love Broadway, but here I get to play all the characters."

Although some books are performed by several readers, about 95 percent are read by a single actor or the author, Zitt says. "It's very expensive" to use a large cast.

Both Kaye and Burroughs estimate it takes them two hours in the booth for every hour of the finished audiobook. Zitt says that's true of the best readers, but more often it's three hours to one. An average audiobook of six to eight hours takes two to three days in the studio.

Kaye says the process for performing an audiobook is very different from theatrical work. For a musical like Sweeney Todd, in which she has played Mrs. Lovett, she says, "You have a long rehearsal time, the performances are blocked, the director guides us.

"For this, the preparation for me is to read the book. And I don't have to put on the makeup."

Burroughs says that although he has successfully read the audio versions of five of his books — he was a finalist for the Audie Award for 2008 Audiobook of the Year for A Wolf at the Table — knowing he'll perform the audiobook doesn't affect him as he's writing.

But, he says, it does affect his revisions. "That's when I find the most egregious errors in the book — while I'm reading it out loud."

Burroughs says the first audiobook that made an impression on him was Stephen King's Rose Madder, read by King and Blair Brown. "I was driving home from Dothan, Ala. I don't remember anything about the drive. I put that book in and next thing I knew I was home."

Colette Bancroft can be reached at cbancroft@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8435. She blogs on Critics Circle at blogs.tampabay.com/arts.