Recorded Books

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. Muller remembered "this traveling salesman who had a crazy idea about recording books onto cassettes and marketing them to commuters." According to John Colapinto (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 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. ==Mergers and deals==

Recorded Books was acquired by Haights Cross Communications in December 1999, where Recorded Books operated as a division of that company. 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 Later in 2015, Wasserstein sold Recorded Books to Shamrock Advisors, a private equity firm. In April 2017 the company reorganized. The new company name is RBMedia and its imprints include Recorded Books, HighBridge Audio, Tantor Media, ChristianAudio, Gildan Media, W.F. Howes (UK), and Wavesound (Australia). It would sell or distribute titles directly to customers through audiobooks.com, through libraries and resellers such as Audible. As of 2017, Recorded Books operates as an imprint of RBMedia. In June 2020, Recorded Books announced a deal for Blackstone Audio to exclusively manufacture, sell and distribute their physical media audiobook titles (CD & MP3) to consumers, retail, distribution and libraries in North America. ==Sales and operations==

Although Recorded Books was not a public company prior to its 2017 acquisition, they released some operations and sales figures over the years that provide a sense of the company's growth and size. According to a 2004 article, most of Recorded Books' 330 employees were based in Maryland, with 15 staff in New York, 15 in the United Kingdom and a number of sales representatives around the United States. In January 2015, after the acquisition of Tantor Media, Recorded Books a catalog of more than 22,000 titles. In August 2015, after the acquisition by Shamrock Advisors, the company reported publishing 3,000 new books annually with catalog of 25,000 titles. ==References==