• About Podiobooks.com
  • What are podiobooks?
  • How do I subscribe to a book?
  • What is a podcatcher?
  • Will my standard RSS newsreader work?
  • Are they really free?
  • But doesn't "free download" mean "piracy"?
  • But shouldn't the author get paid?
  • Can I donate to support the authors?
  • Are these just samples?
  • Why are some IN PROGRESS and some COMPLETE?
  • Why do I only get one episode in my feed?
  • Can I download items manually, by clicking on a link?
  • Why do some files download SOOOO SLLLOOOOOWWWWW?
  • Why do I need to register?
  • Why am I missing chapters after hitting the "Release ALL episodes now" link?
  • Why are you using JOINT STEREO when MONO files are smaller?"



• About the Book Listings
  • What's the difference between Family Friendly and For Kids?
  • What does "Explicit" mean?
  • What about the titles that have no special rating?
  • Can I get you to change a rating if I think it's incorrect?
  
  
  
• Authoring A Podiobook
  • Where can I find your submission guidelines?
  • What tips do you have if I want to create a podiobook?
  • Where can I find music or sound effects?
  • What is Audacity? How do I use it?

The termpodiobooks was coined by Evo Terra to describe serialized audio books which are made available in podcast format. Listeners to Podiobooks.com can choose to receive the episodes of their books via an RSS feed or by listening to episodes by directly downloading episodes from this site. Some listeners keep the audio files on their computers, some transfer the book to CD, but most transfer the file on to their mp3 player so they can listen no matter where they are.

Why are the books on Podiobooks.com free of charge? Many authors do this to get exposure for their work, others do it in the hopes you'll buy their next work in development. Still others simply do it for the sheer joy of writing. And while it's not required, you have the option to donate money to the author of your choice. When you consider that audio books run usually 50% more than their hardcover counterparts... we hope you'll be generous. Authors receive 75% of all the proceeds from the donations from listeners. The smaller portion goes to the maintenance and upkeep of Podiobooks.com.

Thanks for giving our site a try. We hope you find podiobooks as infectious as we have!

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Two ways, and both of them very simple:

1. Click and listen - When you find a book you want to listen to... do it. Click on any of the episode links near the bottom of the page and the episode will either download or start playing on your computer.

2. Subscribe to a book, and we'll send you one episode at a time - Perfect for the busy person with an overloaded MP3 player. To do this, simply:
   • Register for an account. It's completely free, no obligation whatsoever.
   • Log in to the system.
   • Find a book that sounds like fun.
   • Click the "subscribe" link under the book cover on the book's page.
   • Visit the My Subscriptions page. Cut and paste the "Your Personal Feed" URL into the podcatcher of your choice.
   It's as simple as that. And don't forget, you are in control of how often you get new chapters.

If the word "subscribe" is new to you, here's how to do it:

How to Subscribe in iTunes

1. Click on the iTunes graphic below the book cover on your subscription page.
2. If that doesn't work, open iTunes
3. Select Menu > Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast
4. Cut and paste your Personalized Feed into the box.

How to Subscribe in Juice

1. Click on the 'Get Juice" graphic below the book cover on your subscription page.
2. If that fails, go to the "Podcast directory" tab, then cut and paste your Personalized Feed into the box.

How to Subscribe in Transistr (was iPodderX)

1. Click on the 'iPodderX" graphic below the book cover on your subscription page.
2. If that fails, go to File > Add New Subscription and then cut and paste your Personalized Feed into the box.

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Put most simply, podcatchers read your RSS file and automatically download enclosed media files (the book episodes). Once a podcatcher has been "fed" a feed, it will check that feed on a regular basis, fetching the audio files. Some podcatchers can even move the files to your portable MP3 player automatically. Others just leave them in a folder for you to do something with later.

You have lots of options when it comes to podcatchers. Juice, iTunes, Transistr, Bloglines, Nimiq, Doppler... some a free, some are browser-based, some for Mac, some for PC, some for Linux... do a search on "podcatcher" or "podcast receiver" and see what you get back.

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Maybe. Quite a few of these applications have been upgraded recently to handle enclosed media files. But others are simply text readers, which are no good at handling audio and video files. If you subscribe to a book with one of these, you'll simply get brief descriptions of the chapters instead of the audio files. If you're madly in love with your RSS reader of choice, see if it will handle podcasts, or if an upgrade to do that is available from the vendor's website.

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Yes. They are really free. However, these authors work very hard working on their books, and we work hard maintaining this site and paying the hosting bills. If you donate to for a book, we split your donation so that 75% of your cash goes to the author and the remainder goes to pay for hosting and bandwidth. And maybe someday, salaries for the staff. Please, be generous!

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Well in a word, no. Every book we have on Podiobooks.com published with the express permission of the author and/or audio copyright holder. We ask all of our authors to make sure they own their own rights to distribute the audio file, or to make sure this is OK with their publishing company or whoever else might hold the audio rights.

Downloading and sharing the files you get from Podiobooks.com is not illegal. In fact, it's encouraged. Most of the audiobooks we offer here are made available via a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License, but be sure and check the media files of each. The idea, in general, is to spread the words, so start spreading!

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Certainly! Creative people have a right to receive compensation for their hard work. That's one reason why we don't charge authors to be a part of Podiobooks.com, and why we give them the lion's share of any contribution made by listeners.

Podiobooks.com is simply one more arrow in the quiver that makes up the writer's career. To carry the analogy further, writers need to shoot as many arrows as possible in just the right places to ensure they have a writing career, and not just "a book." This site won't do that alone. Heck, nothing will do that alone.

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Please do! You'll find a donation link associated with every book on the site. When you donate, we'll give 75% of the donation to the author of the book you have selected.

If you'd rather not make an electronic donation, you may send your donation to the following address: Podiobooks.com
[INCLUDE BOOK TITLE PLEASE]
PMB 254
3165 S. Alma School Rd #29
Chandler, AZ 85248

Make your check out to ASW Consulting Services and be sure to include the name of the book in the memo field or somewhere else so we know who gets the cash!

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Nope, not at all! These are or will be full length novels, compilations, anthologies or other sorts of books.

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Books that are IN PROGRESS are in the process of being recorded. Please go ahead and subscribe, but there is a chance that you may "catch up" to the most current chapter the author is recording. If this is the case, you will have to wait for the next release from the author, which may be less frequent than your current update settings. We'll give you a quick note in your subscription if this happens to you so that you know what's going on.

Books that are COMPLETE are just that: finished. You can set your update frequency to once per day, and you'll burn through the book. No stopping in the middle. When you've received all the chapters of the book, you'll get a final audio file from one of the Podiobooks.com staff, letting you know that you are done, and an email will be sent to you for the same reason. Just like "IN PROGRESS" books, you can end those subscriptions whenever you like.

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One of our first attempts at a tag line was "Anticipation is good for you". Maybe we should have kept it. Anyhow...

When you subscribe to a book, chapters (or episodes containing multiple chapters) are delivered to you one at a time at the interval of your choosing. By default, your feed is updated once a week. You can change that to once a month, or once a day if you need to.

Why are we doing it that way? Wouldn't it make more sense to get everything all at once? Not necessarily. By "serializing" the book, and spreading it out over a period of time, you don't have to make time for an entire book at one sitting. Also, you don't have to worry about "bookmarks". Simply wait for the next chapter to come into your aggregator, and listen. Or wait until you have time, then listen.

Many folks (well, at least two besides me) have found that this delivery method makes podiobooks much easier to read than a print book, e-book or even audio book. You never have to remember where you were, or to take your book with you. It shows up, you listen, and all is right with your world.

Additionally, you may find it possible to listen to a whole bunch of books at once. If you sign up for Noggle Stones on a Tuesday and leave the default time span to a week, you'll get a new chapter every Tuesday. Try subscribing to Morevi on Thursday, and you can expect new episodes every Thursday. I figure you can listen to at least 7 books that way, no problem. Assuming you have nothing else to do with your time.

If you find that you're not getting chapters fast enough, go ahead and change your setting to a more frequent time frame. And of course, the reverse works as well. No need to re-load the feed into your aggregator. Simply update your subscription on this site, and you'll start getting episodes at the new frequency interval the very next day.

And if you have to "have it all" right now, click the "Release ALL episodes now" link on your subscription page. You may have to make some modifications to your podcatcher to cause it to retrieve all the episodes, but you'll get everything we have all at once.

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Yes. Even without a subscription. All you have to do is navigate to a book page, scroll down and click on the name of any chapter. Play it on your computer or save it to your hard drive for later. The choice is yours. Though we still think a subscription and custom feed is the better option... but to each his own!

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All of the files served up on Podiobooks.com are done so by the generous folks over at Liberated Syndication. In an effort to balance out the load, files are moved around to different parts of their network. Some are "fast" downloads, some are "slow" downloads. It happens. If you're trying to get the files RIGHT NOW, you might have issues. But if you just let your podcatcher run over night (which was the whole idea behind podcasting in the first place), you really should never notice when things are on the slow side. Patience, young grasshopper... patience. :)

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People. Trust me on this. It may make no sense at all on the surface, but I assure you that there is no file size difference between an MP3 file encoded in mono, stereo, or joint stereo at the same bit rate. Bit rate and duration are the only things that determine MP3 file size. And if you're using joint stereo, there's no quality difference, either. In fact it's better to always select joint stereo, even if your source signal is mono, because mono MP3 files cause glitches in some MP3 players. They'll even lock up video iPods occasionally if the firmware isn't up-to-date.

Yes, that was quite deep for those of you who don't care. But since the question seems to always come up I thought it best to put it here in writing.

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Registration allows us to build a custom podcast feed just for you. We customize each feed so that you start "reading" the book from the very first page, the way it was meant to be done.

When you subscribe to a book, chapters (or episodes containing multiple chapters) are delivered to you one at a time at the interval of your choosing. By default, your feed is updated once a week. You can change that to once a month, or once a day if you need to.

Why are we doing it that way? Wouldn't it make more sense to get everything all at once? Not necessarily. By "serializing" the book, and spreading it out over a period of time, you don't have to make time for an entire book at one sitting. Also, you don't have to worry about "bookmarks". Simply wait for the next chapter to come into your aggregator, and listen. Or wait until you have time, then listen.

A note about privacy: We don't give out any information. Period. Nor do we sell it. More info on that can be found here.

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There's been a bit of confusion about the function of the "Release ALL episodes now" link.

The Release All link will allow all the episodes to appear in your podcatcher. Different podcatchers will handle this differently...some will download all of those episodes. Some will not, and you need to trigger the download manually. Most default to set to only download the most recent episode. When you pushed the button for Release All, it did just that. But since your podcatcher is set to only grab the most recent file, which is the THE END file, that's probably what you heard. These are settings inside the podcatcher itself, and not something that we can control.

You need to edit your preferences to download all of the episodes. Each podcatcher handles that differently: please consult the help files for you podcatcher for more instructions.

If you find that you are missing chapters, especially in iTunes: delete your subscription in iTunes, and then re-add it. This usually clears up the problem. I wish we had more control of this, but alas, it's part of how iTunes works some times. We're trying to see if there is anything we can make this easier.

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If a title has a "For Kids" designation, that means that the book was written specifically for kids. Parents and adults might enjoy the book as well, but the target audience was for someone in the Juniors department.

If you see a "Family Friendly" rating, you can rest assured the book is safe for family listening. It may not be aimed specifically at your kids, but you can assume that the language and content are of what you might expect on U.S. network television in the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday.

Now keep in mind, every kid and every family is different. We're trying our best not to make value judgments here. If you're really concerned your kid might hear something you don't approve of, you should be listening first. And if you've ever petitioned a public library to have a title removed from the shelves because it might damage your child... well, we're not gonna make you happy no matter what we say.

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The "explicit" rating was created by iTunes. There are no hard and fast rules to what is and what is not "explicit", but we do the best we can. We've decided to take the grown-up route. Last time I checked, you local library didn't have an "explicit" section. We'll mark a book "Explicit" if the sex or violence or debauchery is gratuitous. If that scares you, stick with the Family Friendly section.

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We point out the books that are for kids. We point out the books that are family friendly. We even use the iTunes "explicit" ratings. But for everything else... that's your decision to make. We're not in the business of somehow rating the rest of the things.

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Sure you can. We rely on our authors to tell us if something needs the FF, FK or Explicit tags. Give us some specific information on why you think it should be changed, and we'll work with the author. However, we reserve the right to make the final call.

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We have written a handy guide to all things Podiobooks.com. You can download it from our Interested Authors page.

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We have written a handy guide to all things Podiobooks.com. You can download it from our Interested Authors page.

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Tee answers...

When I segue from one scene to another, I go into my editing software (GarageBand) and I put together quick bumpers of music. Whatever I create with the software is ROYALTY FREE and my own. Now I don't know what editing software you are planning to use, but many of these audio editors come with loops that can be mixed and tinkered with in order to provide your work with royalty free beds. You can also use http://www.royalty-free.tv which had reasonably priced royalty free music. I paid $18 for a fanfare, and when I used it in context of the scene it was money well spent. This can get expensive, but if you have friends who are musicians, you can always get written permission from them to use their music. Then there's http://music.podshow.com . DO NOT USE COPYRIGHTED MUSIC WITHOUT PERMISSION. While the perfect fanfare for me in Chapter Eight would have been the 45-second fanfare Patrick Doyle composed for Kenneth Branagh's HAMLET, I could not use it as it is copyrighted material and would be used without permission. Now, Sound Effects should serve as "seasoning" for certain scenes. Sometimes, it can be just a hint of spice that makes the moment sing.

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Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

You can download it from the Audacity home page.

As for how to use it, there are a number of tutorials on the web. However, here are a few that we have recommended in the past:

• Audacity 1.2 Tutorial by Dan Eliot - Learn how to open and edit a WAV file, and save the result in an MP3.

• Multi-Track Recording Tutorial from AGNULA - Make a simple multi-track recording.

• Audacity Tutorial by Daniel James - Shows how to mix a multi-track project. Includes sample sound files.

• Audacity Tutorial from TSOF

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