THE LONG-PLAYER GOODBYE: How vinyl changed the world

What started out as an informative book about the history of the long playing record, very quickly turned into something snide and snipey as the author began to write about music which he personally finds uninteresting and boring. Consequently, and with great irony, his book becomes uninteresting and boring at the same time.

I haven't finished it yet (I'm a slow 76 year-old dyslexic reader, and there are 400 pages of story), but it is a scholarly, yet readable, account of the LP's lifespan. At a time of self isolation it's a very useful resource. It's been very interesting so far, and I've got plenty of time to finish it. I can already highly recommend it to anyone who, like me, has an interest in the history of recordings.

Just a very broad overview of the history of long player record which didn't tell me anything I didn't already know bar its genesis in 1948 which was fairly interesting.

Arrived promptly . Good condition. Love the way Travis Elborough writes. Purchased this as we have just aquired a record player.

This book purports to be a history of the vinyl LP, its rise, decline and (slight) return, but it is really just another potted history of mainstream popular music from the '60s to the present day. It's a shame, because it starts out so well - the first third of the book tells the story of the development of the vinyl long-player in fascinating and apparently well-researched detail. If the author had kept this up throughout, the book would have been great. Unfortunately, by chapter 6 he seems to have run out of anything to say about the format itself, and reverts instead to a plodding and over-familiar exposition of popular music from the Beatles through psychedelia, prog, punk, post-punk, so on. I'm guessing that the target audience for this book is made up of Mojo-reading anoraks who will know this stuff back to front anyway, so really, what is the point? And the author has a wearying tendency to fall back into glib cliche (for example, "...after the murder of a fan at Altamont in 1969, [the Rolling Stones] retreated into a cocoon of coke and morphine"....Of course! That was what got them started). The story isn't helped by a surprising number of mis-spellings and minor, but annoying, inaccuracies.Overall, this is a missed opportunity, a good idea poorly executed. So many potentially interesting facets of vinyl culture are not covered at all (as a previous reviewer notes, developments in audio engineering are not even touched on), or mentioned only in passing (the gatefold sleeve, cover art, quadrophonic sound, mysterious pressing plant inscriptions on the runout groove, etc). The eventual decline of the format is given about 2 pages, the recent surge in interest / sales a few sentences. There is a whole book about this fascinating subject still waiting to be written.