Link to July 27 New York Times article, "Say So Long to an Old Companion: Cassette Tapes ".

Excerpt:

There was a funeral the other day in the Midtown offices of Hachette, the book publisher, to mourn the passing of what it called a “dear friend.” Nobody had actually died, except for a piece of technology, the cassette tape.

While the cassette was dumped long ago by the music industry, it has lived on among publishers of audio books. Many people prefer cassettes because they make it easy to pick up in the same place where the listener left off, or to rewind in case a certain sentence is missed. For Hachette, however, demand had slowed so much that it released its last book on cassette in June, with “Sail,” a novel by James Patterson and Howard Roughan.

Coincidentally at Middleton, we're in the process of weeding the last of our books on tapes. Numerically, the collection peaked in 1999 with a total of 2593 volumes. As of June 30, 2008, we were down to 884.

Comparative January-June circulation statistics for this format:

421 in 2008 (out of a total year-to-date circ of 370,624)

724 in 2007

1064 in 2006