The scene: an audiobook studio in London, New York, anywhere in the world. Piles of paper scripts everywhere. New ones, used ones, ones in the process of being edited. In the days of abridgements, the piles were numerous but small. Then, as digital unabridged recordings began to dominate, there were the same number of piles, but they were huge!

Scripts for the readers, scripts for the producers, scripts for the engineers.

The postage, the envelopes, the couriers. The recipients waiting in for parcels which won’t go through the letter boxes. The mislaid deliveries.

All those trees. Then, all those trips to the recycling centres. The ink.

The printer/photocopier going at full steam, seemingly, for days. The noise.

Generally, actors put two pages up on the lectern. Some manage three, but the danger is the voice starts to sound differently as the head moves unconsciously from left to right across the microphone spectrum. Ah!

And of course for every change of page, the editor has to make an edit. That’s 1,000 extra edits on big novels – and by golly, some of those 19th-century novelists were voluble.

David Shaw-Parker reading Trollope

But, pop into the Naxos AudioBooks studio these days (and many others it must be said) and things look very different. Here, for example, is David Shaw-Parker reading Trollope. The first volume, The Warden, was released in April and more from the Barsetshire Chronicles will come next year.

There, on the lectern, is his iPad. A wonderfully fluent yet characterful reader, David is enjoying Trollope seamlessly. He has prepared the novel using a nifty app called iAnnotate, which allows actors to mark the ‘script’ with little memos to himself of pronunciation, stress, voice etc. He reads away, and as he gets to the bottom of the screen, out comes his index finger and he flicks the script upwards, and Trollope continues without a fragment of interference.

Meanwhile, in the control room, our producer Pippa Vaughan is sitting there with her headphones on, following the script on her PC. She is ready to make a mark for the editor when there is an occasional retake, or a slight creak of a chair, or when David pauses for a moment’s reflection.

There isn’t a piece of paper in sight.

This is the way of audiobooks in 2013.

Many of our readers and producers now work in this way and find it far easier as it enables them to concentrate more easily upon literature and performance. We expect this now from the younger readers of course – there is no excuse here! But our veteran readers also have taken to the new technology like a duck to water. Sometimes there is an initial resistance, but once they try it they are totally persuaded.

There are times when it is not possible to work this way. Perhaps we can’t get an electronic text or one that can be annotated. We can’t be totally draconian about it. When I discovered that one reader declined to use the iPad and insisted on sticking with paper, I did consider, for a moment, whether to re-cast. But Pippa said that talent must come before technology, and I suppose it must.

For the moment.

The trouble is that these new ways are not only so much more efficient, but they are also so much FUN!

Well, at least for a Gadget Man like me.

And you’ve gotta believe me guv: you DO get a better recording.

Mostly.

Sexually innocent Jude Fawley is trapped into marriage by the seductive Arabella Donn, but their union is an unhappy one and Arabella leaves him. Jude’s welcome freedom allows him to pursue his obsession with his pretty cousin Sue Bridehead, a brilliant, charismatic freethinker who would be his ideal soul mate if not for her aversion to physical love. When Jude and Sue decide to lead their lives outside marriage they bring down on themselves all the force of a repressive society. This fearless and outspoken story caused a furore on its publication and was Hardy’s last novel.

DOWNLOAD ONLY – CDS AVAILABLE IN JUNE. This is one of the most accessible of Nietzsche’s works. It was published in 1887, a year after Beyond Good and Evil, and he intended it to be a continuation of the investigation into the theme of morality. In the first work, Nietzsche attacked the notion of morality as nothing more than institutionalised weakness, and he criticised past philosophers for their unquestioning acceptance of moral precepts. In On the Genealogy of Morals, subtitled ‘A Polemic’, Nietzsche furthers his pursuit of a clarity that is less tainted by imposed prejudices. He looks at the way attitudes towards ‘morality’ evolved and the way congenital ideas of morality were heavily coloured by the Judaic and Christian traditions.

DOWNLOAD ONLY – CDS AVAILABLE IN JULY. John Masefield (1878–1967) was one of the most prolific, popular and successful poets of the twentieth century. Masefield broke upon Edwardian literature with the startling work entitled The Everlasting Mercy, which described the spiritual enlightenment of a drunken poacher. Over the span of his lifetime, he was appointed Poet Laureate and amassed a large number of admirers, which included such high-profile names as John Betjeman, Robert Graves and W.B. Yeats. This collection contains thirty-six poems and spans Masefield’s entire career. There are early poems from Salt-Water Ballads (1902) and Ballads (1903), followed by extracts from the narrative poems The Everlasting Mercy, Dauber and Reynard the Fox. The selection also includes a number of sonnets including ‘On Growing Old’, as well as his poetry on the Romans, alongside a number of rarities.

DOWNLOAD ONLY – CDS AVAILABLE IN JUNE. Wordsworth’s Prelude is the consummation of his achievement as the great founder of English romanticism. An autobiography in verse, it tells of his childhood in the Lake District, his student days in Cambridge, his passion for the French Revolution and his later disenchantment with it, and his personal journey to a belief in Nature as the great moral and spiritual force which shapes human life, but on which human society all too often turned its back. Subtitled ‘Growth of a Poet’s Mind’, The Prelude is both a key document in the history of English literature, and an inspiring work of imagination, as fresh and challenging today as when it was written two centuries ago.

Our hero Tom, a friendly young rogue with a heart of gold, has fixed his heart on the delicious Sophia, daughter of a wealthy landowner. Losing hope, poor Tom finds solace in the beds of a host of beautiful women, at least one of them old enough to be his mother. He leaves a trail of broken hearts behind him, only to discover... but that would spoil the story − you must listen and see! This great English classic is brought to life by Bill Homewood’s lively reading.

Well over a century after Wagner’s death, the man and his music are as controversial as ever. Praised for his profound insights into the workings of the human heart, he has also been condemned as a dangerous libertine, a proto-fascist and an arrogant bore. His vast four-part operatic Ring cycle has been elevated as one of the greatest achievements of western culture and dismissed as an unparalleled example of creative megalomania. This audiobook makes no attempt to gloss over the darker sides of Wagner’s character, personally or artistically, but argues that the finer aspects of his vision transcend its flaws. It tells the story of an extraordinary life, and charts Wagner’s development, from unpromising beginnings, into the creator of some of the most brilliantly innovatory and seductively beautiful music ever composed.