Publicist Megan Fitzpatrick sent us this photo from the wake the Hachette Audiobooks team threw last Friday afternoon for the book-on-tape—after putting out James Patterson‘s Sail, the company has stopped production on cassettes, committing itself fully to CDs and digital downloads. To mark the occasion, Fitzpatrick reports, “we festooned a conference room with audio tape ‘streamers,’ encouraged people to wear black, and brought old mixtapes from highschool to the party.” Despite the long faces, she assures us it was a fun party.
Audiobooks are in a precarious place right now, though, tapes or no tapes; while the Association of American Publishers reports that sales were up 1.7 percent in the month of April, they’re still down 13 percent for the first four months of 2008, one of the most sharply declining categories the group is tracking…