2008 Unfinished Tales (Erin Jones)

Release Date: 2008.02
Reader: Erin Jones
Language: English
Organization: Library of Congress
Publisher: American Printing House for the Blind
ISBN: n/a
Duration: 25 hours 4 minutes
Unabridged: Yes
Country: English
Licenced: Yes
Formats: Cassette, 4-track tapes, Digital BARD
NLS Book Number: RC 65877

Produced by American Printing House for the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled service of the Library of Congress. This reading was made purely for eligible members of this special library service in the USA and not available for commercial release.

Jones has been a narrator for The National Library Service for over 24 years and has recorded over 1,000 titles. She has also read The Silmarillion.

In 2007 the NLS realized that the 1982 Barrs recording was too degraded for the new digital BARD system and they commissioned Erin Jones at the APH to do a new recording in their Louisville studios. The February cassette release (RC 65877) was announced in the January-February 2008 issue of Talking Book Topics (TBT). When the NLS moved to the digital book (DB) format in 2009, they used these high-bitrate digital masters for distribution via their BARD (Braille and Audio Reading Download) servers.

In Unfinished Tales, the index isn’t just a list of page numbers; it contains significant unique commentary by Christopher Tolkien. Erin Jones reads the phonetic and etymological breakdown of the names, which is a very slow, technical process. Because Unfinished Tales is an anthology, the NLS added specific Digital Navigation Points to this recording allowing a blind patron to skip directly to The Quest of Erebor or The Hunt for the Ring for example, without manual searching.