From time to time someone who impacted our lives and our culture passes on and a look back at their life or contribution is worth remembering. Duvall Hecht, the founder of Books on Tape, is dead at 91.

Here is his obituary from the New York Times: 

His desire to listen to something enriching on his daily commute led him to start the company whose success made audiobooks a commercial phenomenon.

Duvall Hecht, whose boredom at listening to music and news on the radio during his long daily commute in Southern California led him to start Books on Tape, which broadly commercialized the audiobook, died on Feb. 10 at his home in Costa Mesa, Calif. He was 91.

His wife, Ann Marie Rousseau, said the cause was heart failure.

In 1975, Mr. Hecht was craving intellectual stimulation during his rush-hour commutes between his home in Newport Beach and his office in Los Angeles, where he worked in marketing for the investment banking firm Bateman Eichler, Hill Richards. At first he rested a reel-to-reel tape recorder on the seat beside him and played recordings of books that had been made for blind people.

But the selection was limited, and he wanted more. So he decided to record books himself.

Working with his wife at the time, Sigrid (Janda) Hecht, from their living room and later from a former sailmaker’s loft, Mr. Hecht built Books on Tape by renting and selling cassettes through the mail to individuals, schools and libraries.

The Hechts held down costs by hiring little-known actors to narrate the books. They built their catalog by recording books that were in the public domain, and by negotiating with publishers for the sublicensing rights to make unabridged recordings. At their headquarters in Costa Mesa, a dozen tape decks busily duplicated titles from master cassettes.

Many of his thousands of customers became hooked.

“One customer called our tapes ‘the best invention since sex’; others say they’ve even missed appointments while trying to finish a whodunit,” he told The Detroit Free Press in 1984.

All the company’s audiobooks were unabridged: Each word of an original book was read, no matter how many pages there were. It would take, for example, 20 hours to finish listening to “Great Expectations.”

When publishers like Random House and Simon & Schuster later joined the market with abridged audio versions of their books, Mr. Hecht was unmoved. He stuck to his niche: providing hours (and hours) of uncut recorded mysteries, history and travel books, thrillers and biographies to those who were stuck in long drives or had lots of leisure time.

“When people who’ve been buying abridgments find us, they think they’ve died and gone to heaven,” he told The New York Times in 1996.

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