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Recorded Books is an audiobook publishing company with operations in the US, UK and Australia. It provides products and services to retail customers and libraries. Recorded Books was founded in 1978 by Henry Trentman, one of the pioneers in the audiobook industry. The company has since been sold twice: Haights Cross acquired the company in 1999 from Trentman, and it was sold again in January 2014 to Wasserstein & Co., a private equity firm. Recorded Books is the parent company of HighBridge Audio and Tantor Media. ==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.〔 Although he was not the first audiobook company, unlike the commercial variety of books sold in bookstores at the time, which were usually abridged at 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. (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 cell phone."〔 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.〔 Recorded Books was acquired by Haights Cross Communications in December 1999, and Recorded Books operated as a division of that company.〔 In 2002, Haights Cross acquired Audio Adventures, a brand established in the truck stop market to tie in with 650 rental kiosks in truck stop centers Recorded Books previously had.〔 In January 2014, it was announced that Haights Cross sold Recorded Books to Wasserstein & Co., an independent private equity and investment firm located in New York and Los Angeles.〔 In May 2014, Recorded Books acquired HighBridge Audio from Workman Publishing. HighBridge Audio was initially founded by Minnesota Public Radio in the early 1980s to produce and distribute recordings of Garrison Keillor's ''A Prairie Home Companion''. Since then, HighBridge produced approximately 45 titles a year in the forms of spoken word audio cassettes, CDs and downloadable audio books. The company was best known for publishing public-radio related titles, as well as Oprah's Book Club titles. HighBridge made use of two readers in its audio book production for works primarily involving two main characters. Other popular titles published by HighBridge included ''The Time Traveler's Wife'', ''Water for Elephants'', ''Life of Pi'' and ''Across the Nightingale Floor''. In January 2015, Recorded Books announced its acquisition of Tantor Media 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Recorded Books」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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