HTML5 will be the future of publishing (Tools of Change) 60% of Audiobooks Sold Are Now Digital (Galleycat) The great sci-fi hunt: help us find the best independently published books (The Guardian) Little, Brown UK launches digital-first imprint for literary fiction (Paid Content) Kindle Daily Deals: 30 Kindle Fiction e-books for $1.99 or less...

Few things can make for more of a fun personal experience than hitting the open road and bringing along some books-on-tape. Of course, the modern embodiment of books-on-tape, audiobooks, are the easiest means of devouring a long tome when your eyes are busy with more important tasks than reading lines on paper. Understandably, audiobooks are not for all people. Personally, I too prefer good ol' paper-and-ink. But for those times when it’s impossible to curl up with a fat paperback, Audiobooks.com is now providing deals that are worth being seriously excited about. On Monday, the company announced that—coinciding with its one-year anniversary—it's now...

PRESS RELEASE Tantor Media, one of the largest independent audiobook publishers in the nation, is venturing into the realm of print and e-books. The 12-year-old Connecticut-based publisher—after releasing over 2,700 audiobooks—is launching its new print line this fall with a combination of fiction and nonfiction. Tantor will serve consumers and authors by publishing in all formats: print, e-book, and audiobook, to all markets—capitalizing on the emerging marketplace for new content delivery methods. CEO Kevin Colebank  believes that expansion in an industry that is going through many dynamic changes is a good strategic move. “We now will provide a complete selection of content options for...

E-books aren’t the only form of tech-related books whose business models are seeing technological disruption lately. The Bookseller has a report on a controversial initiative offered by (Amazon-owned) Audible.com in which the audiobook store will pay authors who sign up to Audible Author Services $1 per sale out of a $20 million fund, in addition to the normal royalties such audiobook sales offer. The offer is open to any author who has an audiobook available for sale through Audible.com or Audible.co.uk. Apart from the $1 per sale, Audible Author Services itself seems to be mainly a setup to let...

Are digital audiobook services non-starters? On FutureBook, Martyn Daniels posts about all the up-and-coming audiobook services FutureBook expected to take off, but subsequently didn’t. These aren’t just fly-by-night services, either; at least one of them offered quite reasonable pricing and readings by quite famous actors. With the infrastructure already existing and music MP3 going DRM-free, there was no reason that the public should not have adopted them, or so they thought. But it didn’t happen and instead the ebook lurched forward, took off and we forgot the audiobook. The reasons for the lost audio opportunity were...

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...