The Royal National Institute for the Blind began talking books (7/11/1935)

The first two titles recorded were Agatha Christie's _The Murder of Roger Ackroyd_ and Joseph Conrad's _Typhoon_.
"It would take around ten discs to record an entire novel. Special turntables had to be designed that would play at appropriate speeds."
I assume that would mean a slower speed, but he doesn't say what it was.
I have no idea how long it would take to read an average novel at a reasonable pace. 12" 78rpm records could carry maybe 5 minutes of music on a side; if two-sided, 10 discs would then be about 1 hour 40 mins. (I used to have a recording of Bach's B minor Mass on 78s, and the number of discs relative to performance time is in the right ballpark.)
Anyhow, Wikipedia has a much fuller account of the whole thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiobook
For a start, the Americans were a bit earlier -- American Foundation for the Blind/ Library of Congress  "Books for the Adult Blind" project, starting in 1931. Both the British and American initiatives were in response to many soldiers who had been blinded in the Great War, some of whom for various reasons were unable to learn Braille.
Then, once you start going back, you realize that there were bits of poetry being recorded from the very infancy of the phonograph -- from Edison's "Mary had a little lamb" on. Here's one of Tennyson doing the "Light Brigade" in 1890 onto a wax cylinder. (Note: The audio is real; the image is a "virtual movie", not actual cinema but an animated photograph.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkqUq26z1CE
or maybe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zBfwYCILTk
 From there on the story is: technical improvements in recording expand the range of possibilities for "talking books": 33 1/3 rpm LP records from 1948 (and at some point the 16 2/3 speed, never popular with consumers, but made it possible to put a whole radio program on one side); cassettes from 1960-ish; and since the 1980s various digital formats. There's now an industry, and in 1994 they made "audiobook" the official generic term. (I always liked the name "talking book" -- Stevie Wonder made it an album title in 1972.)