Audiobook

An audiobook, or talking book, is "a recording of a book or other work being read out loud." A full reading is "unabridged"; a shortened one is an abridgement. Production is a directed performance: the narrator sits "in a recording booth reading the text, while a studio engineer and a director record and direct the performance," and "many audiobooks are also now recorded in home studios by narrators working independently." The format's lineage runs from Edison's phonograph through the 1930s talking-book program for blind readers and the cassette market to the digital downloads Audible began selling in 1998.

For the author it is a distinct edition, not a byproduct: "an ebook, audiobook, paperback, and hardcover edition of the same book must each have a different ISBN," so the narration is planned and identified like any other edition, and prose that performs aloud, the discipline of how to write dialogue, is the prose that narrates well.