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322 SOUND MOTION PICTURES
Finally, "talking books" are a development along scientific entertainment lines that are being offered to the public. A company has recently been formed for the purpose of publishing record versions of books as well as to license book publishers to manufacture and use their records and machines. A specially prepared disk which can run seventy-two minutes is the means of exploitation. The record is sixteen inches in diameter, and a book of 35° pages can be recorded on two sides of the disk. In this manner best sellers may be recorded and made available in circulating libraries and book stores. This innovation may be expected to create a new reading-listening public. Books may be recorded with incidental musical accompaniment, to suit certain passages of the story. Although the innovation was originally intended as a means of furnishingj-eading matter for blind people it is adaptable for other commercial purposes. Through the use of such a record an entire entertainment can be recorded and afterward sent over a radio sending station. This might be a very valuable means of advertising a particular entertainment, since a whole programme can be made and then broadcast. Such a procedure would take the place of a national hook-up; records could be furnished each station instead of sending it from a master station over leased wires. When one learns that an entire opera may be recorded on ten or twelve records the significance is obvious.
Fifty years from now the average American public library, in addition to offering its shelves of the printed works of Shakespeare, Voltaire, Ibsen, and Shaw, may be equipped with reproducing projectors, and a complete record of the plays of our day may be available, as well as the speaking images of the great personalities.
It is easy to see, then, that the commercial utility of sound is only partly bound up with its fate in the theatre. Of course, some of the phases I have discussed in this