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. ...

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."...

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...

According to Gadgetell, Until now, because of the service’s DRM, users haven’t been able to use Audible on Android devices. Audible has finally solved that problem by releasing a beta Android app. The app links to your Audible account and allows you to download and listen to any audiobooks purchased through that account. You don’t have to wait for the full download to complete before listening, though which is a nice touch. If you don’t want to download the audiobooks onto your smartphone, side-loading it also available. The app also features Audible news and trophies. There...

Over at iPad Nation Daily, Stephen Windwalker has an article about a $0.99 app that will read thousands of free audiobooks on your iPad, iPhone or Touch. The app is called Audiobooks and has a bookmarking feature, sleep timer, advanced search and, for the iPad, a web browser. The books are from the LibriVox project and there are over 3,200 of them. From what I gather from the article they are mainly classics. Check out Stephen's article for more info....

Received the following question from librarian Ned Heeger-Brehm: I follow your blog with great interest and I particularly appreciate the sales information you pass along. For my own clarification, when the Association of American Publishers report that “Ebook sales up 176.6% in 2009” does that include eaudibooks or just ebooks? I’ve wondered the same thing about the IDPF statistics reported at www.openbook.org. ...

Last November we reported on a new audiobook romance publisher - AudioLark which was was about to get started. Now i've got an email from Jennifer Feddersen telling me that they are up and running with 10 titles for sale and they are adding 2 to 3 new romance audiobooks per week. Jennifer says that their production schedule is booked for the next 6 months and that they have agreements in place with The Wild Rose Press and Changeling Press, as well as contracts directly with authors. They also seem to have a pretty generous affiliate program, which pays 30%...

This is a great comic entitled Why DRM Doesn't Work or How to Download an Audio Book from the Cleveland Public Library. Unfortunately, the way is presented doesn't let me reproduce it, copyright permitting, here. It is simply too big and if I made it smaller it would be unreadable. Be sure to go over and take a look. Thanks to Adam McDiarmid for the heads up....