A Stitch in Time audiobook...finally?!

[Greg Cox]

the popularity of the author (that i'd never heard of)

For what it's worth, you were not alone. I remember being surprised at the time by how many folks on this board seemed to be unaware that Hamilton had become a HUGELY bestselling author since writing Nightshade back in the day. Clearly, there was a less of an overlap between Trekkies and readers of erotic vampire fiction that one might expect . . . .

Granted, I wrote the cover copy for the first few "Anita Blake" paperbacks so I was quite familiar with her work.

Proof that genre publishing can be a very small world sometimes.

 

[Sci]

Clearly, there was a less of an overlap between Trekkies and readers of erotic vampire fiction that one might expect . . . .

This is possibly the greatest sentence in the history of the TrekBBS.

 

[Tosk]

Clearly, there was a less of an overlap between Trekkies and readers of erotic vampire fiction that one might expect . . . .

Exhibit 2: Sub Rosa.

(Before anyone Actuallys me, yeah I know all about the rumors and disputed facts about its origins, my lame joke is based purely on the reputation of the ep.)

 

[JJMiller]

Star Wars is rereleasing some older titles with new covers in trade paperback as part of an essential Legends collection. I would love to see Star Trek do something like that one day, especially if they can get artists that make the covers pop as much as the German releases.

I have lobbied hard for this. Michael Stackpole is seeing his Rogue Squadron novels taking off again, and I was really glad my Kenobi trade came out in time for the TV show. Further and to the point of this thread, Random House is using the opportunity of these “Essential” re-releases to give audiobooks to the titles that didn’t have them.

I have no inside information, but I imagine it’s a matter of time. The heyday of the mass-market paperback is over and most publishers wouldn’t think of putting a new novel out today without an audio version. (And yes, the German covers are great, and a nice ready-made option should they be available.)

 

[Sci]

The heyday of the mass-market paperback is over

Tangent, but this fact makes me very sad. I love the mass-market paperback format, and it drives me absolutely crazy that the last few "First Splinter" novels were trade paperbacks that don't match with all their MMPB predecessors. And I could fit so many MMPBs on my bookshelves!

 

[mastadge]

Tangent, but this fact makes me very sad. I love the mass-market paperback format, and it drives me absolutely crazy that the last few "First Splinter" novels were trade paperbacks that don't match with all their MMPB predecessors. And I could fit so many MMPBs on my bookshelves!

Right? I go out of my way to find old mmpb printings of novels, especially lengthier ones, because they're so much more comfortable to me than the formats popular now. I remember being bummed back in the day when some but not all of the Harry Potter novels were released in mmpb (I suspect they were trying to cater to the market of adults who didn't want to be seen buying a YA novel? I dunno.).

 

[Avro Arrow]

I would be extremely surprised if they co-read it, as Simon & Schuster's license is for single-reader audio only. More than one person reads it, it becomes a dramatic audio presentation. They were able to make an odd exception for the early audios where Leonard Nimoy read bits as Spock while George Takei or James Doohan read the bulk of the (abridged) text, but that time has passed.

How did that work for the Spock vs. Q series? According to MA, they were also released by S&S Audio. But it also says they are an “Alien Voices Production”, did that have an effect on the licensing arrangement? Or are they just another couple early-year exceptions?

(IIRC, the two characters interacted in that series. Although it has been a very long time since I heard them, so it’s possible I’m misremembering... but I kind of also thought the interaction was the point of the series! )

 

[KRAD]

Spock vs. Q was produced by Alien Voices, who had their own license to do performances of the things. However, they weren't set up for mass-market distribution of their audio productions, so they did a deal with S&S Audio to do distribution. But the deal to do it with Paramount was with AV, not S&S.

 

[JJMiller]

I’ve covered the business and consumer cases encouraging the move to trade paperbacks elsewhere in the forums a few times already, so no need to do that again. I do think that from the point of view of both the authors and the TrekLit community, anything that gets a publisher to invest in promoting its backlist is good, and this method has been shown to work very well.

I don’t like comparing the music and book markets, but I do think it’s interesting that audiocassettes are coming back in limited runs as boutique items for collectors. Where vinyl is more akin to our hardcovers — a prestige package that offers a different experience — the cassette pretty much only has nostalgia going for it. But it is apparently enough to support limited releases in the format. Maybe that’s where the mass-market paperback format fits in years from now? Hard to say. Certainly the book market today looks nothing like it did a generation ago!

 

[captainmkb]

Clearly, there was a less of an overlap between Trekkies and readers of erotic vampire fiction that one might expect . . . .

at that point in my life i was much more engrossed in erotic vampire nonfiction

 

[Christopher]

I don’t like comparing the music and book markets, but I do think it’s interesting that audiocassettes are coming back in limited runs as boutique items for collectors. Where vinyl is more akin to our hardcovers — a prestige package that offers a different experience — the cassette pretty much only has nostalgia going for it. But it is apparently enough to support limited releases in the format. Maybe that’s where the mass-market paperback format fits in years from now? Hard to say. Certainly the book market today looks nothing like it did a generation ago!

I still have my tape deck, but it's been sitting unused for so long that I don't know if it still works. (I have one more A/V device than I have openings for in my cabinet, so I've always kept it nearby to swap in if I had occasion to use it, but I never have.)

Honestly, though, I don't see the appeal even as a nostalgia item. Cassette tapes were fiddly to work with and the sound quality wasn't all that great. Their only real virtues were portability and erasability, but they always seemed like an inferior medium to vinyl, or even to the big reel-to-reel tapes that my father used at his radio station and for home listening. (My father once composed and performed a piece of music called "Dialogue for One," which used a tape stretching from the recording head on one reel-to-reel tape recorder to the playback head on another several feet away, so that it recorded his live sax playing and played it back a few seconds later, and he improvised off of his own tape-delay echoes, which built up in multiple layers as it went on. You couldn't do that with a cassette.)

 

[JJMiller]

As noted, I’m not totally thrilled with the comparison — you can still read paperbacks with the same hardware you always had, whereas there is format drift in music. The reason I chose cassettes rather than CDs for the comparison is retailers can still make money on CDs because the profit margin is higher than with paperbacks.

I keep my non-mixtape cassettes more or less as totems — so pure nostalgia. VHS is somewhat different because I know I recorded a lot of earlier-era commercials and news events, and there’s a Lost Media interest in some of that. But I doubt I will find time to ever harvest it before it all fades off the tape!

 

[Christopher]

you can still read paperbacks with the same hardware you always had

I actually need an additional piece of hardware for that these days, to compensate for the deterioration of my inbuilt hardware.

I keep my non-mixtape cassettes more or less as totems — so pure nostalgia.

"Mixtapes" are a concept from after my time, I think, or at least one I wasn't familiar with at the time. Most of my cassettes were copies of entire LPs, either of my own LPs for portable listening or of my father's LPs so I'd have my own copy.

Although there were occasional cases where I'd record a movie LP's tracks in the original film order on cassette. And there was one time I did create a "mixtape" of tracks from my Star Trek LPs in an attempt to simulate the tracked score of my own TOS episode.

 

[Sci]

"Mixtapes" are a concept from after my time, I think, or at least one I wasn't familiar with at the time.

It's my understanding that mixtapes were very common in the 1980s as a result of the rise of the cassette. I don't know if she used the term, but my late mother made lots of mixtapes by recording songs off of the radio back in the late '80s and early '90s.

 

[Christopher]

It's my understanding that mixtapes were very common in the 1980s as a result of the rise of the cassette. I don't know if she used the term, but my late mother made lots of mixtapes by recording songs off of the radio back in the late '80s and early '90s.

I think that by the time I became aware of the concept from TV and movies, they were already being done on CD. But I've never exactly had my finger on the pulse of pop culture.

 

[Eduardo]

https://twitter.com/TrekMovie/status/1563235694817923075

Andrew Robinson thanks fans for getting Simon and Schuster to turn his book “A Stitch in Time” into an audiobook. #StarTrekDS9 #56YearMission​

 

[bdub76]

Any idea of the timing of this? I'll have to save an audible credit for it.