Dear Reader,

Libraries (and some very old, very eclectic bookshops) are sacred spaces of simultaneously infinite and finite knowledge and possibility. My work with books began as a child volunteering at my local library, leading book groups for children even younger than I was. I volunteered in the libraries of every school I attended, culminating in a university job at the Van Pelt Rare Books Library at University of Pennsylvania during my academic tenure. There were a lot of castles on campus, buildings of stone and age that were steeped in knowledge and curiosity, and this particular one was crammed full of old wonderful inspiring books. Then, on the heels of this experience, after a lot of left turns and some emotional proof of entropic tendency, I found true love at an audiobook studio.

I started at Talking Book Publishers by engineering and directing a cast of wonderful, lively, intelligent narrators 5 days a week, 2 sessions a day. I worked with some of the smartest, most curious, most irreverent (in the best way) people I’d ever met. We made audiobooks for the Library of Congress’ National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. My engineering and directing trained into auditing and editing, which then evolved into mastering. I even narrated a book once, and found it very helpful in understanding what my narrator coworkers experienced. It was rewarding to make books that let people enjoy reading, who wouldn’t otherwise be able to. I am so lucky to have gotten the opportunity to be helpful and have such validating purpose.

Five years later, after getting my jib properly cut, my plotline moved to NYC. I worked as a Quality Control Engineer for John Marshall Media in proofing, auditing, and editing capacities. Here I got to learn what commercial specifications were, and what commercial mastering looked like. I love seeing the specification variance in different marketplaces, and the myriad creative ways we worked to meet those specs with such elastic source material. At TBPI, we’d had smooth-running established protocols honed by decades of experience. In the wilds of commercial audiobooks, I got to learn all the physics-bending ways different studios handled baffling and signal path and research protocol and engineer/director/narrator arrangement. I got to hear the differences between a hundred home studios all across the country, and sometimes across the world. I had trained in the beginning with the same 20 lovely intuitive voices, but now I got to learn how to anticipate mastering adjustments and breath patterns and fade requirements for a new voice with every project. I got to listen to a new artist with a new style, vision, and approach every day.

In the beginning, I fell in love with audiobooks because I got to bring books to people who couldn’t read visually. The farther into it I get, the more I appreciate the artistic capacity for a particular marriage of form and function that only audiobooks have.

It is a wild, wonderful world of audiobooks out there and I’m in love with exploring it.

-Lya Dainwood