What is the oldest audiobook?

[CrabbyCrab]

Is it is the public domain? I wonder who first thought of the idea to record a book and how far back it goes.

[TriciaG]

Well, WE go back to 2005, and OUR very first published audiobook was https://librivox.org/the-secret-agent-by-joseph-conrad/

I think the first recorded texts (not full audiobooks) started very early after Edison invented the phonograph. Looking at the Wikipedia entry for audiobook:

The first recordings made for the Talking Books Program in 1934 included sections of the Bible; the Declaration of Independence and other patriotic documents; plays and sonnets by Shakespeare; and fiction by Gladys Hasty Carroll, E. M. Delafield, Cora Jarrett, Rudyard Kipling, John Masefield, and P. G. Wodehouse.[1] To save costs and quickly build inventories of audiobooks, Britain and the United States shared recordings in their catalogs. By looking at old catalogs, historian Matthew Rubery has "probably" identified the first British-produced audiobook as Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, read by Anthony McDonald in 1934.[3]

[CrabbyCrab]

Thank you! that is really interesting.