These readers are all ears

Anyone with two hours and a tall glass of water can read aloud Molly's soliloquy, the unpunctuated, 24,000-word passage that concludes James Joyce's "Ulysses."

But few storytellers can really light it up, says Nicholas Soames, founder and managing director of NAXOS Audiobooks in Surrey, England. Mr. Soames chose Marcella Riordan, a stage actress who also knows her way around a microphone, to read as Molly Bloom in his company's audio version of the book.

"Marcella is also an extraordinarily understanding Joycean," says Soames, whose mastery of casting made his audiobook one of three finalists for Audiobook of the Year at the "Audies," the industry's Oscar equivalent. This year's awards will be announced Friday in New York. [Editor's note: The original version included the wrong date for the announcement.]

The other finalists for the prize, which also takes into account production, packaging, and sales: Bill Clinton's "My Life," read by the former president, and actor Tim Curry's rendition of Lemony Snicket's novel "A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning." (www.audiopub.org)

Other awards cover 31 categories.

Besides applauding the best pairings of voice and written word, the Audies celebrate the rapid rise of audiobooks both as a dramatic art form and a means of delivering volumes of written content - whether lightweight, how-to books or literary masterpieces - to a society that likes to read but often can't sit still.

Audiobooks represented an $800 million business in 2003, according to Mary Beth Roche, president of the Audio Publishers Association, which stages the awards. Those sales - primarily tapes and CDs sold in stores and via online retailers such as Amazon.com - have since grown at about 14 percent a year.

The big driver: audio downloads. Credit the proliferation of portable devices - iPods, Palm PDAs, pocket PCs, and, increasingly, "smart phones" - with digital-audio capability.

"It has gone really fast," says Don Katz, president of Audible.com, the largest provider of downloadable recorded-voice audio. "Just a few years ago we were under $1 million" in revenue, he says. Last year the firm took in $34 million, adds David Joseph, a spokesman. It could take in $65 million this year. [Editor's note: The original version misspelled the company name.]

While Audible also packages newspaper content and its own audiofiles - its staff recorded and released "The 9/11 Commission Report," for example (an Audie nominee for achievement in production) - the firm attributes most of its success to its distribution of thousands of audiobooks by major publishers.

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