Recorded Books

• 1. Introduction

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  Recorded Books was born in 1978 from a commuter's frustration. Henry Trentman was a salesman who spent long hours behind the wheel, listening to the radio, and he kept thinking: there had to be something better. What he imagined was nothing like the abridged audiobooks already on the market, those two-to-four-hour condensed versions that left listeners with only a fraction of the story. Trentman wanted full, unabridged productions, twenty or more cassette tapes per title, rented through the mail to people just like him. The question was whether anyone else wanted that too. The answer, it turned out, would take about six years to become clear.

• 2. The Salesman's Bet

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  Henry Trentman founded Recorded Books in 1978 in Charlotte Hall, Maryland, with a conviction that commuters deserved better than what they were getting. His instinct about quality ran through every decision from the start. The first recording the company made, in 1979, was Jack London's The Sea-Wolf, narrated by Frank Muller, a local actor from Washington DC's Arena Stage. Muller later recalled meeting "this traveling salesman who had a crazy idea about recording books onto cassettes and marketing them to commuters." Those early titles stayed in the public domain, which meant Jack London was a natural fit. Gradually, after the company brought in professional stage actor Alexander Spencer as a narrator, Recorded Books began moving into copyright works as well. For the first six years, Trentman kept his day job. The company simply did not generate enough revenue to support him full-time. He worked at Recorded Books part-time, building it alongside his other work, waiting for the market to catch up to his idea.

• 3. A Primitive Netflix

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  Studio director Claudia Howard, who joined the company in 1984, described what the early Recorded Books model looked like in practice. "The business was, in those days, a primitive Netflix in that they were rental businesses," she said. "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." John Colapinto, writing in 2012, noted that commercial audiobooks only began to take off in the early 1980s, when suburbanites discovered they were an ideal way to manage the long car commute. Before that, as Colapinto observed, people thought audiobooks were primarily for the blind. The format moved from cassette to CD, and eventually into digital downloads, where listeners could stream titles straight to a computer or download directly to a phone. As the company grew through the 1980s, it opened a recording facility in New York City near Times Square. Headquarters settled in Prince Frederick, Maryland.

• 4. Catalog and Competition

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  A 1989 newspaper article reported that Recorded Books had roughly 450 titles in its catalog at that time, compared to about 2,500 from its main competitor, Books on Tape. The gap was significant in size, but Recorded Books had staked its reputation on sound quality rather than sheer volume. Six years later, by 1995, the catalog had grown to 1,600 books. By 2004, the company was releasing 800 new unabridged titles each year, of which 650 went to libraries, schools, mail order, and rental. Fifty of those 650 titles reached the retail sales market, and 150 were sold exclusively into the United Kingdom. First-quarter 2004 net sales exceeded sixteen million dollars. By January 2014, the catalog held more than 13,500 audiobook titles. In the 1990s, the company had built an in-house sales department and a dedicated team focused on schools and education. In 1997, it began selling directly to the United Kingdom, and by 1999 it had launched W.F. Howes Ltd. as a wholly owned UK subsidiary.

• 5. Acquisitions and Growth

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  Recorded Books was acquired by Haights Cross Communications in December 1999, becoming a division of that company. In 2002, Haights Cross added Audio Adventures, a brand that operated in the truck stop market through 650 rental kiosks at truck stop centers that Recorded Books had previously maintained. In January 2014, Haights Cross sold Recorded Books to Wasserstein and Co., an independent private equity and investment firm with offices in New York and Los Angeles. That same year, in May 2014, Recorded Books acquired HighBridge Audio from Workman Publishing. HighBridge had originally been founded by Minnesota Public Radio in the early 1980s to produce and distribute recordings of Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion. Over the years it had become known for public-radio-related titles as well as Oprah's Book Club selections, producing roughly 45 titles a year. Its catalog included The Time Traveler's Wife, Water for Elephants, Life of Pi, and Across the Nightingale Floor. HighBridge used two readers for productions that centered on two main characters. In January 2015, Recorded Books announced the acquisition of Tantor Media, after which its combined catalog exceeded 22,000 titles. Later in 2015, Wasserstein sold the company to Shamrock Advisors, another private equity firm, which reported the business was then publishing 3,000 new books annually with a catalog of 25,000 titles.

• 6. Becoming RBMedia

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  In April 2017, the company reorganized under a new name: RBMedia. Recorded Books became one of several imprints, joined by HighBridge Audio, Tantor Media, ChristianAudio, Gildan Media, W.F. Howes in the UK, and Wavesound in Australia. Titles moved to customers through audiobooks.com, through libraries, and through resellers including Audible. A 2004 snapshot of the company's workforce captured the scale before that reorganization: 330 employees in total, most of them based in Maryland, with 15 staff in New York and 15 in the United Kingdom, plus sales representatives spread across the United States. In June 2020, Recorded Books announced that Blackstone Audio would exclusively manufacture, sell, and distribute its physical media audiobook titles, covering CDs and MP3 formats, to consumers, retail outlets, distributors, and libraries across North America. Frank Muller, the narrator who had delivered that first recording of The Sea-Wolf in 1979, remained one of the company's most prolific and popular voices across the decades that followed.