From The Canadian Jewish News Thousands of hours of Yiddish audio books and literary programming taped at the Jewish Public Library (JPL) from at least the early 1950s are about to enter the digital age. [Clip] The Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., has embarked on a two-year project to remaster and digitize these cassettes and older reel-to-reel tapes and put them online where they may be heard free of charge anywhere in the world. “We believe this to be the world’s largest remaining collection of unabridged recordings of modern Yiddish literature,” said the book centre’s founder and president Aaron Lansky about the audio books....

From the Minneapolis Star Tribune: More than 100 metro-area libraries serving about 2 million users depend on one provider of digital audiobooks, but there’s a problem: The company’s technology is so plagued with glitches that one county library system temporarily suspended the service and another will be launching a separate service in February. “We hate, we absolutely hate that the customer service we’re providing right now is not working or variable,” said Chris Olson, executive director of the Metropolitan Library Service Agency (MELSA), a consortium of 103 libraries. “We know that’s poor service.” [Clip] Recorded Books LLC, the company that provides the service, has...

From the press release: Audiobooks.com announced today the launch of the first unlimited cloud-based audio book service. For $24.95 per month, users can take advantage of unlimited cloud-based audio content via an Android or Apple mobile device with no need to return audio books, no long-term contracts and no time constraints on audio book use. Audiobooks.com features several technical innovations that are unavailable from any other audio book source. Since it's a cloud-based service, Audiobooks.com allows users to instantly access thousands of popular titles from anywhere using an Internet-enabled mobile device such as an iPhone,...

Once again Open Culture performs a good service by putting us onto these free ebooks.  Here's the list and links.  More info about Dick in the article. eTexts (find download instructions here) “Beyond the Door” – Multiple formats – iTunes First published in 1954, the text is not usually found in collections of Dick’s writings. “Beyond Lies the Wub” – Multiple formats – iTunes Dick’s first published story. Originally appeared in Planet Stories in July, 1952. “Mr. Spaceship” – Multiple Formats Appeared first in Imagination in 1953, and later in The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick. “Piper in the Woods” – Multiple Formats First published in 1953 in the fantasy and science fiction magazine, Imagination. “Second Variety”...

I love cooking, so I thought I'd reprint this entry from the OverDrive blog: Now that we have put away the Halloween decorations, set the clocks back and are moving full speed ahead into Thanksgiving and the winter holidays, it’s time to talk about food!  These celebrity chefs have given us recipes, secrets, tips, tricks, techniques and some things we don’t want to know (I’m looking at you, Anthony Bourdain) about cooking and dining out. Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton, chef-owner ofPrune restaurant in New York’s East Village Michael Symon’s Live to Cook by Cleveland’s homegrown Iron Chef with Michael Ruhlman and...

From the press release: The popular Hallmark Recordable Storybook collection is expanding into licensed properties adding the classic titles "Goodnight Moon" and "Curious You on Your Way." Readers now will be able to add their own voices to these two beloved children's books which join other recent literary classic releases including "Guess How Much I Love You," "Counting Kisses" and "On the Night You Were Born." Hallmark Recordable Storybooks feature voice-capture technology, recording the reader's voice directly into the book. When a page is turned, the Recordable Storybook automatically plays the text on that page in the reader's voice, allowing people to...

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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...

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...

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...

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. ...