Comments on: Podcasters! Snag promos for your favorite books!

By: LonnieEzell

LonnieEzell — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 05:07:49 +0000

Chris - beautiful idea! I stumbled across this the other day when trying to work out my own audio trailer and it was a tremendous help to see what others had done. And targeting podcasters was definitely the way to (though I could be biased.) Thanks so much for keeping making this service better and better!

By: JClark

JClark — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 20:19:36 +0000

Kaylea spelled it out pretty well. It’s largely the convenience of it, that you don’t have to remember to go download things, and when there’s something new it’s downloaded automatically for you (depending on how your podcatching software is set up, mine checks every morning before I head to work).

If you really don’t like doing it that way, but you still want to listen, get a simple podcatcher like Juice, then “release all episodes”, and download everything all at once. Of course, if the book is in progress then you’ll have to wait for the rest of the episodes, but it’ll work. I’ve burned a few podiobooks into mp3 CDs and listened to them straight through (using a discman that can play mp3 CDs).

By: Kaylea Hascall

Kaylea Hascall — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 19:22:45 +0000

The idea with podcasting is that it’s sort of like a magazine subscription — you sign up, and stuff just shows up when it’s ready. You listen to it when you want to, and you don’t have to remember to go fetch it. That’s the feed bit. But there’s not a lot to fuss with, in my opinion — I don’t know which podcatcher you use, but with iTunes, I click 1 time to get a subscription, and I’m done. No downloading, no remembering where I saved the stuff, no importing into a program that syncs with my ipod, no keeping track of what I’ve heard or haven’t heard or what didn’t download all the way because my connection went plonk — it’s all maintained in the podcatcher.

The idea with podiobooks is audiobooks done like a podcast. If you’re listening to an unfinished book, you’d get the segments as they were available, or at a pace you decide, until you caught up to the author. It seems like authors on this site really try to hit a ‘weekly’ pace. So the “reading” experience is different — it’s a bit more like the old-time radio drama. With Earthcore, you probably noticed the “next time” and “last time” bits that were in each episode — for me, that added to the experience. Authors making good use of this format seem to shape their segments around that episodic experience, abridging as appropriate.

You also have the option to download all the files if the book is finished, definitely — if you go that way, the advantage to doing it through a podcatcher is that you don’t have to keep track of anything. I don’t know if that helps, but the “podiobook” style works for me because of the reasons above.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 16:36:43 +0000

COMMENT NOT ABOUT ABOVE POSTING.
Podcasting…so I want to listen to an audiobook, and there are authors and readers out there willing to let me listen. So I check out podcasting, and I find I have to do all this feed stuff, and get one chapter at a time, etc. etc. I find it to be a major pain in the butt, compared to simply downloading MP3 files that contain the audio book. That’s how I listened to Earthcore, and it seemed MUCH simpler, with NO learning curve.

There must be something about podcasts that are better than simply downloading audio files, but I haven’t found it yet.