The NAB Blog
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Naxos AudioBooks Celebrates 30 Years
Although we are not accustomed to wallowing in the past, our 30th anniversary is a natural point for us to reflect not only on what we have achieved, but on the development of the audiobook industry over the past three …
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Educational Editions – A New Series From Naxos AudioBooks
Lord Reith, now remembered for establishing public service broadcasting in the UK, set out his vision for the BBC. Its role was to ‘inform, educate and entertain’. At Naxos AudioBooks our primary aim is, of course, to entertain – though, …
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Breaking Boundaries – Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
‘Orlando had become a woman – there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity.’ The …
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2023 – A Year in Retrospective
As we move towards the end of another year, with many of us being able to take some days of rest and recreation, it is natural to reflect on the past 12 months. That’s something that Naxos AudioBooks has been …
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Listening Without Limits – The Naxos Spoken Word Library
Occasionally I am asked the question ‘where can you buy audiobooks’? There was a time when the answer would have been ‘in a bookshop’. Sadly, the same advice today would be likely to lead to profound disappointment. Although there are …
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Julius Caesar’s The Gallic War – History or Propaganda?
Many of us of a certain generation will be familiar with Julius Caesar and his activities in Gaul through the animated adventures of Asterix and Obelix. The opening of The Gallic War – ‘Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres’ …
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AI – Are the Machines Taking Over?
Scarcely a day goes by when there is not an AI news story in our national media. These range from the cataclysmic ‘Artificial intelligence could lead to extinction’ to the more optimistic ‘New superbug-killing antibiotic discovered using AI’. There is …
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The Prevention of Literature – Censorship and Freedom
Earlier this year there was much media coverage surrounding the publication of new editions of books by Roald Dahl. Potentially offensive words had been eliminated or changed… Augustus Gloop was no longer enormously fat, the Oompa Loompas had become gender …
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Arsène Lupin – Gentleman or Rogue?
The first Arsène Lupin story appeared in the periodical Je Sais Tout in 1905, 14 years after the publication in The Strand of the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Scandal in Bohemia. The editor of Je Sais Tout, Pierre Lafitte, …
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Fairy Tales Without Fairies
‘George MacDonald… in his power to project his inner life into images, beings, landscapes which are valid for all, is one of the most remarkable writers of the nineteenth century.’ W.H. Auden George MacDonald, often lauded as the father of …