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....

Cory Doctorow has a column in Publishers Weekly expounding on what he calls “Doctorow’s First Law”: "Any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you, and won't give you a key, they're not doing it for your benefit." In the column, Doctorow reiterates his experience trying to get Audible to forego restrictive licensing agreements on an audiobook of his novel Makers. They declined to allow him to add a boilerplate to the audiobook explicitly authorizing readers to make fair uses of the work, so he did not publish it through them. This year, Doctorow...

The subhead under the LibriVox title is "acoustical liberation of books in the public domain". According to their site: LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net for free. All our audio is in the public domain, so you may use it for whatever purpose you wish. Their catalog says that they have 3,136 books currently available. Go take a look. Via bookofjoe...

This is being shown at the Hong Kong Book Fair. According to Eamonn Fitzgerald: Kiwa Media, a New Zealand company, is displaying its QBook, an iPad application that converts children's print books into multilingual, interactive digital versions. Readers can point at a word and the app will pronounce it. They can also use their fingers to colour in the books' illustrations. Tap the screen and a pull-down menu offering English, Mandarin, Spanish, German and other languages appears. The text is automatically translated. ...

Allen has recorded his anthologies “Getting Even,” “Without Feathers,” “Mere Anarchy” and “Side Effects” — including his short story “The Kugelmass Episode” — can be purchased from Audible.com and iTunes; ClearMetrics said it had also created a homepage for Mr. Allen at woodyallen.com, having wrested the domain name from two Icelandic college students. There's an interview about this with him in the NY Times. You can find it here....

Here's an interesting new company. A Story Before Bed has 125 children's books that one can record and then the books can be viewed and the child can hear them read in the reader's voice. This would be neat for kids who have a parent who travels, or for grandparents, or for members of the armed forces. The parent, grandparent, etc. appears in a small window on the upper right hand side of the book. Flash is required, as is a computer with a webcam so the audio/video can be recorded. They have a demo on...

According to an article in The Guardian, the new purchaser of BBC Audiobooks pledged a multi-million pound investment and said that new titles will be coming including those by celebrities and sports stars. "We want to move beyond BBC [content] and well-known novels," he said. "We are now in a digital era, a whole new era. Look at some of the bestsellers, [they use] ghost writers for memoirs, we can have someone sit down and tell a story over a week."...

The Audible iPhone app is now available and it's free. It's a native iOS 4 app so it can multitask. It includes WiFi delivery of audiobooks, listening stats and other features. You can find it at the App Store....

SYNC is an online community that seeks to build the audience for audiobooks among readers 13 and up. Each week, SYNC will give away 2 FREE downloads--a popular Young Adult title paired with a Classic title that appears on Summer Reading lists--starting July 1 through September 1, 2010. The first two titles being given away are "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley and "The Angel Experiment" by James Patterson. ...

Received the following email from Jonathan Korzen of the Audio Publishers Association: ... I think your readers will enjoy knowing about the free audiobooks, audio short stories, audio dramas, excerpts, poetry, and new fiction being given away as MP3s at AudiobookCommunity.com, the first social network for audiobook fans. In support of "June Is Audiobook Month" publishers are offering downloads (or streams) of great audio throughout the month - works by Hemingway, Milne, Twain, Jennifer Eggers, Sarah Vowell, Martin Amis and the voices of Jim Dale, Michael Madsen, Frank McCourt; classic Sherlock Holmes radio drama and more. Today we've added short, poignant...

The older I get the more I'm intrigued by history. The Churchill Speeches Audiobook for iPad app recently caught my eye and the 99-cent price was irresistible. The app is what it sounds like: a collection of audio recordings from many of Winston Churchill's speeches during World War II. There's nothing remarkable about this as an iPad app though. In fact, I'm kind of surprised the developers didn't first release it as an iPhone app and just make it available for use on the iPad. They went the opposite route though as this one is only available...