We previously mentioned Penguin’s decision to stop making new e-book titles available to libraries in the USA and the UK. The Digital Shift reports that decision extends to downloadable digital audiobooks as well. A message from Overdrive yesterday explains this applies to audiobook titles released after 11/14/2011. In an apparently unrelated move, Amazon-owned BrillianceAudio will also stop offering downloadable audiobook titles. It’s not clear exactly why Penguin is doing this. The reason the company gave for its e-book restrictions was “concerns about the security of the copyright of its authors.” It has not given any explanation for this audiobook restriction. As...

Following up on its announcement of a romance publishing imprint, Amazon has announced it will also launch an imprint called Thomas & Mercer—named for the streets by its Seattle headquarters—this fall, to publish mystery titles. The titles will be available in print, Kindle, and audio formats, from Amazon itself and from national and independent booksellers. The imprint will launch with four titles: Resuscitation by D M Annechino, Stirred by J A Konrath and Blake Crouch, The Immortalists by Kyle Mills and Already Gone by John Rector. It seems clear Amazon is fully prepared to jump into the...

The Fifth Imperium’s Baen CD repository has posted another CD. This one is bound into the release of the Mercedes Lackey superhero “braided world” book Invasion: The Secret World, an outgrowth of a podcast audiobook project inspired by playing and writing fanfic about the MMO City of Heroes. As with past CDs, the contents are DRM-free and free to distribute non-commercially. More than any other Baen CD, this one has personal meaning for me. I was playing City of Heroes at the same time and in the same role-playing/writing guild as Misty and all our friends, many of...

Publishers Weekly reports that, out of 150 titles HarperCollins is releasing as audiobooks this spring, only two are getting CD audio releases—the rest are digital downloads only. The story notes that sales of CDs have been declining, but no other major publisher has yet moved away from CDs to such an extent. Harper insists that it is not abandoning the CD format—it may choose to bring out a few more of those 150 titles as CDs later in the publishing process—but that in recent years its listeners have more and more moved over to digital audio. A Simon &...

The British Library has embarked on a project to map accents and pronunciation of words by English-speakers worldwide, as part of its Evolving English exhibit. To that end, they have asked any English-speaker world-wide to record themselves reading aloud the children’s book Mr. Tickle for the benefit of their collection. The idea is that reading prose aloud tends to be more natural and conversational than simply reading lists of words, and also Mr. Tickle includes some words that have interesting variant pronunciations, like “mischievous” or “extraordinary”. Readers can take part in the project at the British Library...

It continually amazes me how people come up with new stuff in this electronic arena. To wit, Chapterme: This site is meant to help you discover books and authors by listening to random chapters. Then, your tastes will be compared with those of other listeners in order to choose other chapters. The recordings are created by the fabulous LibriVox.org site. At any time you can go to the book page on LibriVox.org and listen to the whole book. From there, you can navigate to Project Gutenberg if you want to get the text. Could be fun to try it out on a...

The Black Library, the publisher of tie-in novels and audiobooks for Games Workshop’s Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 role-playing game settings, is going digital. To promote the event, the publisher has been giving away some free digital content every Friday for the last four weeks, with something more to go up on the site this coming Friday. Available thus far are the novels First & Only and Nightbringer, the first issue of Hammer and Bolter magazine, and an mp3 of the first disc of the Horus Rising audiobook. The e-books are downloadable in MobiPocket or EPUB format, and are...

From the press release. I note that Richard Nash's Red Lemonade imprint is represented by Lynne Tillman. The books are priced at $4.99 and $5.99. We are pleased to announce Iambik Audio, a new kind of audiobook company, launching today with 11 literary fiction audiobooks from independent presses in the US and Canada. In the collection, Iambik is launching audiobooks of one giant of American letters, Gordon Lish (including a selection of stories read by Mr. Lish himself); one Pulitzer Prize finalist, Lydia Millet; and a number of newer and upcoming writers including Felicia Luna Lemus and J. Robert...

On our sister blog Appletell, Bill Stiteler writes about the contortions he had to go through to get a DRM-restricted Overdrive audiobook from his local public library onto his iPod. It turned into a time-consuming process that took far longer than should be necessary for something as simple as checking out a library book. (We covered a webcomic’s look at library audiobook DRM back in March.) Even though the Overdrive Media Console is available for both Mac and PC, only some of its content can be downloaded through the Mac version. Stiteler had to boot into Windows (and...

From the press release: Folium Partners, LLC, announced today the late-November launch of ModernBookFactory.com (MBF), the world's first automated audiobook and app-creation service. The ModernBookFactory service will enable independent publishers, authors and copyright owners to upload manuscripts, select narrators, then receive professionally produced audio and have their books produced as self-contained audiobook apps within 30 days. MBF will place apps in front of a global audience at the Apple iTunes® App StoreSM, on Android™ Market and on the copyright owner’s own website as a digital download. ... Supported by Folium Partners’ existing enhancedAudio+ software, which has been used for hundreds of professionally...

From the Tools of Change blog comes important information for those with disabilities: For years we've supplied our digital files to Bookshare, a non-profit that provides accessible reading material to the print disabled. For qualifying readers, our books are made available worldwide, and we've really enjoyed working with Jim Fruchterman and the Bookshare team along the way (I'm also on their Advisory Board).   Although the DRM-free EPUB files in our ebook bundles are compatible with many reading systems for print disabled customers, many readers prefer the DAISY format that Bookshare provides, and either don't qualify...

Audible is now available in the Android Market. It features chapter navigation, bookmarking, sleep mode and button free mode. It will support wireless transfer from My Library to your android phone. More info here....