I'm usually not a glass-half-empty person, but after several years working with audiobooks, I am shocked by the number of books that are not available on CD.

Perhaps its the fact that although the audiobook market is growing, many bookstores still only think of audiobooks as frontlist items rather than a category that can offer a rich backlist, which makes up the majority of their inventory. Perhaps its the price tag. Most new audiobooks are released at a price higher than $20, so its hard for a bookstore to think about stocking 20 Agatha Christie backlist titles knowing its more than $400 worth of inventory sitting there.

Happily, audiobook publishers are now making the effort to reduce the price of titles that are now considered backlist.  After a year in hardcover, print publishers reissue most books in paperback as a cheaper trade papaerback and then later as an even cheaper mass market. Audio publishers are now creating the same price reduction after the same waiting period (for example with the release of Lisa Scottoline's new mystery, Lady Killer, HarperAudio is releasing the new book on audio at $39.95, but repricing older Scottoline titles like Daddy's Girl, Dirty Blonde and Dead Ringer at $14.95).

By creating these audios priced like trade paperbacks, hopefully bookstores will be encouraged to broaden their inventory.

And hopefully once bookstores expand their inventory, audio publishers will be encouraged to produce some classic bestsellers that are currently not out on CD.

Can you believe Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind--two of the top selling novels of all time--are not available on CD for sale in retail?

Neither are:

None of Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise novels are on CD, nor are the novels of  Shirley Jackson or Blackstone Audio has a few of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels for sale to retailers (and more that is library only).

I also wish some publishers who originally released some books on abridged cassettes would think about re-recording those titles as unabridged versions. Current abridgement lengths vary but few are shorter than five or six hours. But back in 1987 when Richard Thomas recorded Pat Conroy's Prince of Tides, it ran a mere three hours; and the 1985 recording of Valley of the Dolls by Juliet Mills ran just two hours. 

Two of my all-time favorite audiobooks were also MIA. Both were issued on cassette only, were three-hour abridgements and are sadly out of print.

Two months before she died, Gilda Radner read her 1989 autobiography, It's Always Something, and its one of the most moving recordings you can imagine. Her voice sounds weaker than when she was regularly playing Roseanne Rosannadanna, Emily Litella and Lisa Loopner on Saturday Night LIve. But, she writes and reads fearlessly, relating her long struggle with ovarian cancer. Near the end of the audio she she tips her hand to listeners that her tale of cancer may not have a happy ending, saying, "I had wanted to wrap this book up in a neat little package. I wanted a perfect ending. I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and makingthe best of it without knowing what's going to happen next." Radner died at 42 and won a posthumous Grammy Award for this audiobook. I don't understand why Simon & Schuster Audio has never rereleased this recording on CD.

My second favorite audiobook is Fannie Flagg's reading of her 1981 debut novel, Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man, which she recorded in 1992. This wonderful novel is written as a series of diary entries by 11 year-old Daisy Fay Harper over the course of seven years. Laugh-out-loud funny, her novel is ideally suited to the audiobook format because of its episodic nature. Last year Flagg recorded her newest novel, Can't Wait to Get to Heaven, and her mastery of reading funny and poignant material is still as strong as ever. If Random House Audio were smart, they'd get Flagg back in the recording studio to record the material that was originally edited from this abridgment. But I'd settle for a lazy rerelease of the original recording on CD at last.