Duvall Hecht, who spun the tedium of his daily commute into a cottage industry as founder of Books on Tape, a company that converted the written word into recorded sound and helped popularize the concept of audiobooks, died in Costa Mesa, Calif.

Mr. Hecht was an Olympic gold medalist in rowing, a Marine Corps pilot and, with the establishment of Books on Tape in 1975, an entrepreneur who harnessed the still-new technology of cassette tapes to offer bibliophiles a novel way of experiencing literature.