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Audio books ease drive-time blues Mail Tribune / Jim Craven Marketing Manager Paul Coughlin looks through the large selection available at Blackstone Audiobooks in Ashland. Founded by Craig Black in 1987, Blackstone now rents 100,000 audio books a year and sells another 100,000. All the books are produced by Blackstone and are works that have "stood the test of time," Coughlin says. By JOHN DARLING ASHLAND � Craig Black loves traffic congestion. With the average person commuting more than an hour a day now, it inspires people to do something useful with the large amount of time wasted in cars � being able to rent or buy recorded books from his company, Blackstone Audiobooks. "People tell us all the time that it�s a life-changing practice to be able to use that time constructively. It enriches their minds and takes all the pain out of traffic," Black said. Started in 1987, the Ashland-based company is now renting more than 100,000 books a year and selling another 100,000, Black said. Of audio book sales, about a third each go to libraries, bookstores and private consumers. Consumers play them 85 percent of the time in cars and the rest during such activities as gardening and cooking, he said. "We�ve created an identity as the company that doesn�t crank out pulp or genre fiction," said marketing manager Paul Coughlin. "There�s no Joan Collins or Sidney Sheldon. We carefully select books that have stood the test of time." Purchase price runs $40 to $150, while a 45-day rental costs $15 to $90. Renters receive a no-postage-required, pre-addressed box and can return it in the mail. Some 620 local customers save 20 percent by fetching and dropping their audio books in person. Black was inspired to jump into audio books while a traveling store designer in the Los Angeles area, "vegetating" three hours a day behind the wheel. "I tried to read in the car and got in three accidents. The last one nearly killed me. I checked out audio books, but couldn�t find anything really interesting. They were mostly abridged stuff, put out by publishing companies to promote their current books," Black said. Black started his company with a commitment to unabridged, quality literature and non-fiction, using actors � "a Shakespearean background helps" � who eschew "false dramatics" and let the text speak for itself, said Coughlin. A fat catalog and Web site list 1,600 fiction and nonfiction titles in such categories as mystery, children, science, science fiction, sports, travel, religion, politics, Civil War, western, philosophy, economics, classics and philosophy. Black is not a believer in dumbing down for modern, stressed-out people with no attention span, he said. He taped Shelby Foote�s immense, three-volume "The Civil War: A Narrative" onto 94 tapes, selling at $612. You�ll find Aristotle�s Ethics (six cassettes), Emerson�s Essays (seven), Adam Smith�s "Wealth of Nations" (25), Whitman�s "Leaves of Grass" (13), The Federalist Papers (14) and hundreds of enduring novelists. "The titles aren�t picked by polls or focus groups," said Coughlin. "Craig picks them. They have to have good writing and they have to have endured because they�re good." Black is a free-speech advocate, recording authors whether he agrees with them or not, Coughlin said. The catalog shows it, running the spectrum from Goldwater to Kerouac. The obvious hindrance of carrying (and paying for) 96 tapes is about to be overcome with a new compression technology called mp3 that allows a 25-hour book to be stored on one CD. Costs will be greatly reduced by mp3, to about $1 an hour � less than a fourth of cassette cost, said Black. Blackstone will launch mp3 with 25 titles in March. However, consumers must have CD players with the new mp3 feature. Blackstone will sell mp3 players for $150 and they can be adapted to present CD and tape players. They can also be played on computers. Black moved the company from Medford three years ago and built his own headquarters, whose corners are impishly topped off by grinning stone gargoyles. It houses all the means of production plus warehousing, shipping, Web site ordering and administration. The privately held company is growing at around 20 percent annually, grossing almost $3 million a year, and is No. 3 in revenues among marketers of unabridged audio books, Black said. "The appetite for this medium is going to increase," said Black. "When we started, only one in 10 people had even heard of audio books. Now most people have � and most bookstores are carrying them." Coughlin, himself an author, calls audio books "habit-forming, but enriching." "Listening to music, talk radio and commercials can take you only so far. It wears you out after a while. The main benefit of audio books is you get to redeem your time and immensely enrich your life. "You�d be amazed, just driving back and forth between Medford and Ashland, how much book you can listen to � if you do the speed limit, that is." Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.