Assistive Media

[1] Assistive Media was founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1996 by David Erdody as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

[2][3] According to Erdody, it was inspired by his father's diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy, an avid reader of The New Yorker magazine and audiobooks.

[1][4] He considers Duvall Hecht's Books on Tape (company) and the narration style of Grover Gardner to have had a major influence on his admiration for the audiobook format [1] .

[3] In 1998, with the advent of online digital audio formats such as RealAudio, direct distribution of recordings shifted to the Assistive Media website and has received praise from the at-large online disabled community and also from David McCullough, Mark Cuban, and John Perry Barlow.

[1][6] Assistive Media has produced spoken-word recordings of works of nonfiction literature and long-form journalism from The Atlantic, Granta, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Scientific American, and Wired.