The Observer Music Monthly has just released its list of the 50 greatest music books ever, formed through consultation with its world-class music experts and readers. Included prominently on the list is Evan Eisenberg’s The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa, with the following description: “How technology has changed our conception of what music is; deep.”

The Recording Angel charts the ways in which the phonograph and its cousins have transformed our culture. The book, newly available in a second edition, includes a new Afterword by Evan Eisenberg, which shows how digital technology, file trading, and other recent developments are accelerating–or reversing–these trends. Influential and provocative, and hailed by Garry Giddins as a “marvelous book, and unlike any other,” The Recording Angel is required reading for anyone who cares about the effect recording has had–and will continue to have–on our experience of music.