From the press release: Audible, Inc., today announced the launch of ACX (ACX.com), a dynamic online audiobook rights marketplace, audiobook production platform and online sales system. The Audiobook Creation Exchange is a groundbreaking innovation that will allow any professionally published book, new or old, to become a professionally produced audiobook. By directly connecting professional authors and other book rights holders with actors, studios, and publishers, ACX serves the tremendous demand for audiobooks created by the growth of the digital audiobook sector.  ACX’s audiobook production platform allows authors and publishers access to the thousands of talented actors and studio professionals who bring books...

From the official Kindle Daily Post: Now hear this! We’re thrilled to announce that more than 50,000 Audible Audiobooks are available for download on the latest Kindle via Wi-Fi delivery. Of course, owners of any Kindle device can continue to purchase Audible audiobooks from Audible.com and transfer the titles to Kindle via USB. Audible offers two free audiobooks with a 30-day free trial of AudibleListener® Gold Membership. To get started, go to theAudible Audiobooks Store to view audiobook titles available for purchase from Audible, read by your favorite celebrities, authors and professional performers. Hear Donald Sutherland breathe life into The Old Man...

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...

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...

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...

Here's the OverDrive list for adult fiction ebooks. You can find the full list here. ...

From a Blog Post In June, we concluded a survey, linked on 10 of our highest traffic websites, with more than 5,000 responses from patrons around urban and rural America. The survey included questions regarding demographics, computer/device usage, borrowing habits, general feedback on user experience, and suggestions for collection development. [Snip] Here Are a Few Findings: + 74% of users are female, between the ages of 30-59. + Nearly 70% have a college and/or postgraduate degree. + 60% learned about the download service from the library’s website (if our past blog posts and training sessions weren’t enough to get you ...

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. ...