I don't listen to audio books, but what I love about this is that they took this idea in their early 20s and ran with it.
Marianne Mantell, Who Helped Pave the Way for Audiobooks, Dies at 93
In her early 20s she co-founded the groundbreaking spoken-word record label Caedmon, which had a hit with Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.”
Marianne Mantell, who in her early 20s helped start the audiobook revolution by co-founding a record company that turned recordings of countless literary giants, including Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Dylan Thomas, into mass-market entertainment, died on Jan. 22 at her home in Princeton, N.J. She was 93.
Ms. Mantell (then Marianne Roney) was a struggling 22-year-old freelance writer in 1952 when she and Barbara Holdridge (then Barbara Cohen), a former classmate at Hunter College in New York City, founded Caedmon Records, a pioneering spoken-word label specializing in great literature.
https://artdaily.com/news/154386/Mar...ks--dies-at-93