UNABRIDGED VERSUS ABRIDGED. It is a discussion as old as audiobooks.

It is partly about simple commerce – unabridged audiobooks can seem high priced, though the hours fly by. But it is also about convenience: I think there is still a place for abridged texts, for not everyone wants to listen to twenty-eight or thirty hours of a novel.

However, I am glad to say that the advent of downloads, and a greater appreciation of the full work, has seen the audience for unabridged texts on audiobook grow.

This has resulted in trips down memory lane for me, because I find that not only are we doing novels which we did in abridged form in the early years of Naxos AudioBooks, but we are recording them, often, with the same actors – though sometimes a new voice takes up the baton.

This is true of two of this month’s recordings: Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse read by Juliet Stevenson and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer read by Garrick Hagon.

It is a coincidence that we are releasing new unabridged recordings of these masterpieces with the original readers, but in both cases, the abridged recordings were the first to introduce us to readers who have featured regularly on Naxos AudioBooks in the decade and more that followed.

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