[5] Trentman was a salesman who spent a lot of his time driving and listening to the radio and he believed there was a market for better quality recorded books on cassette tape targeted to commuters.
[6] Unlike other audiobooks sold at the time, which were usually abridged to 2–4 hours long, Trentman envisioned unabridged productions of 20 or more tapes which could be rented mail-order, and that would be of high quality sound and professional narrators.
[6] The company's first recording was in 1979 as The Sea-Wolf by Jack London narrated by Frank Muller, a local actor at Washington DC's Arena Stage.
[6][7] Muller remembered "this traveling salesman who had a crazy idea about recording books onto cassettes and marketing them to commuters.
[8] For the first six years, Trentman worked at Recorded Books part-time since the company did not generate enough revenue to justify his coming on full-time.
[10] In January 2014, it was announced that Haights Cross sold Recorded Books to Wasserstein & Co., an independent private equity and investment firm in New York and Los Angeles.
[12] HighBridge Audio was initially founded by Minnesota Public Radio in the early 1980s to produce and distribute recordings of Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion.
[13] Other popular titles published by HighBridge included The Time Traveler's Wife, Water for Elephants, Life of Pi and Across the Nightingale Floor.
[14] In August 2015, after the acquisition by Shamrock Advisors, the company reported publishing 3,000 new books annually with catalog of 25,000 titles.