Recorded Books is an audiobook imprint of RBMedia, a publishing company with operations in countries globally. Recorded Books was formerly an independent audiobook company before being purchased and re-organized under RBMedia, where it is now an imprint. Recorded Books was founded in 1978 by Henry Trentman, one of the pioneers in the audiobook industry.
History[]
Recorded Books was founded in 1978 by Henry Trentman in Charlotte Hall, Maryland. Trentman was a salesman who spent a lot of his time driving and listening to the radio and he believed there was a market for better quality recorded books on cassette tape targeted to commuters. Unlike other audiobooks sold at the time, which were usually abridged to 2–4 hours long, Trentman envisioned unabridged productions of 20 or more tapes which could be rented mail-order, and that would be of high quality sound and professional narrators.
The company's first recording was in 1979 as The Sea-Wolf by Jack London narrated by Frank Muller, a local actor at Washington DC's Arena Stage. Muller remembered "this traveling salesman who had a crazy idea about recording books onto cassettes and marketing them to commuters." Muller would remain one of Recorded Books' most prolific and popular narrators over the years. At first, the book titles were in the public domain,such as Jack London. However, after Recorded Books picked professional stage actor Alexander Spencer to narrate books, they began branching out into copyright works.
For the first six years, Trentman worked at Recorded Books part-time since the company did not generate enough revenue to justify his coming on full-time. Later, as the company grew during the 1980s, it opened a new recording facility in New York City near Times Square. According to The New Yorker (2012):
- It actually took about six years for Recorded Books to catch on. At first, people thought that audiobooks were for the blind.. Commercial audiobooks started to take off in the early eighties, when suburbanites discovered that they were an ideal way to mitigate the horrors of long car commutes. According to Claudia Howard of Recorded Books: "The business was, in those days, a primitive Netflix in that they were rental businesses. You'd call an 800 number with your credit card and rent your cassette book for thirty days through the mail. It came in a cardboard box with a row of cassettes. Eventually, they were on CDs. The last ten years has been the download—you stream them straight to your computer or download straight to your cellphone."
In the 1980s, the company established its headquarters in Prince Frederick, Maryland.
In the 1990s, it created an in-house sales department and a department to focus on schools and education. In 1997, Recorded Books began selling directly to the U.K. and by 1999 the company had launched W.F. Howes Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary in the U.K.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid audiobooks[]
Recorded Books has released audiobooks for each main installment in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. These versions are narrated by Ramon De Ocampo.