[Rylon]

I love radio dramas. I think it's a curse. Like, in a previous life I was a silent film producer who wouldn't make the transition to talkies and now I enjoy an art form that's difficult to find and poorly classified as punishment for my unwillingness to change with the times.

Anyways.

So once upon a time there as a company called Mind's Eye that made a radio dramatizations of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit The Lord of the Rings. They aired on NPR and, at the time, people liked them. You may have seen the LOTR version for sale at a bookstore. It came in a big wooden box filled with cassette tapes. Later, it came in a slightly less big box filled with CDs. The Hobbit box was also big and made from dead trees.

Treebeard would not be happy.

Sorry.

Anyways, I'm looking for the these on Amazon and I get to the LOTR version. And, on a lark, I look at the reviews. The most helpful reviews are both for an expensive print version. One review dispensed with a review of the book itself and launched into a discussion of the merits of the various print editions you may come across. Most of the reviews I read seemed to reviews of the book and not this specific adaptation.

'Cause that's exactly what this is, an adaptation. No one's reading the book. It's no more Tolkien's work than the movies. Yet radio dramas are continuously labeled audiobooks and categorized with them. I don't know why. It's not like someone wishing to listen to book would be happy to buy and adaptation instead. And if someone was looking for an adaptation, and got a single person reading, they'd be disappointed to.

The BBC adapted the entire Sherlock Holmes cannon for radio, and it can be difficult to find them at libraries because don't always differentiate between an audiobook and a radio drama.

And don't get me started about trying to find Dirk Maggs radio drama about Spider-Man. Spidey's MIA with regards to that.