Audible Ready for Its Hollywood Close Up

The Los Angeles Times explores audio books and, specifically, the growing company Audible.

From the story...

To hear Audible chief executive Donald Katz tell it, his Newark, N.J.-based company is one of the few growth sectors in acting these days. Audible is the largest producer and seller of digital audio books, issuing more than 1,000 titles a year, all in need of narrators. “If you sat at the Broad Street train station, you’d see dozens of actors coming off the train every day, heading to our headquarters,” he told me last week. “We’ve got six studios, running two shifts each day to keep up with the books we’re doing.”

Until now, most of the actors were off-Broadway and TV working stiffs, moonlighting from their day jobs in regional theater or on various “Law & Order” shows. But Katz told me he is about to launch an ambitious effort to rebrand a new line of literary classics. After months of intensive negotiations, Audible has signed up a host of stars, including Dustin Hoffman, Kate Winslet, Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman, Samuel L. Jackson, Anne Hathaway, Annette Bening and Susan Sarandon.

Audible is offering the prestigious group of Oscar-worthy talent unusually high fees for their services, but the real attraction for actors, who often spend years waiting around for a plum dramatic role, is simple enough: The actors picked the book they wanted to read. When the new series debuts early next year — it’s tentatively called Project A List, though Katz is looking for a more formal title — audio book fans can hear Winslet reading Emile Zola’s “Thérèse Raquin,” Hoffman reading Jerzy Kosinski’s “Being There,” Jackson reading Chester Himes’ “A Rage in Harlem,” Sarandon reading Carson McCullers’ “The Member of the Wedding” and Hathaway reading L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”