Podiobooker
News from the Staff of Podiobooks.com

There are some changes sweeping the publishing world, and they have a lot of people nervous. One was recently reported in the NYT. It seems that HarperCollins is contemplating not paying new authors advances for their books:
Author advances and bookseller returns have long troubled the publishing industry. Best-selling authors can command advances so high that […]

Assuming the gang at Tech Crunch aren’t pulling our collective legs:
In Japan, half of the top ten selling works of fiction in the first six months of 2007 were composed on mobile phones.
Read that again if necessary. Composed on a mobile phone. Not read. Composed. That lends further evidence to my hypothesis that we […]

J.C. Hutchins, author of the successful “7th Son” podcast novel trilogy, has accepted a book deal to publish “7th Son: Descent,” the series’ debut novel. The thriller is scheduled for a 2009 U.S. spring/summer release by St. Martin’s Press.
“7th Son” is the story of seven strangers who have been brought together after the recent assassination […]

For aspiring podiobook authors who want to even out, normalize, maximize and generally improve their raw narration tracks, I highly recommend getting the latest copy (recently revised) of The Levelator.
It’s a free download that works on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms, so just about everyone can use it. Some of the hard-core audio engineers […]

Here’s a statistic for you:
“From 98 to 99 percent of all books ever published are now out-of-print, so they don’t show up in traditional bestseller lists.”
That comes from Anirvan Chatterjee, founder of BookFinder.com founder. I pulled that from a post on The Book Standard if you want more information.
But I don’t. I’m a little disgusted. […]

I’ve seen a couple of blog posts recently about this new thing called Shrink My Tunes.

The reality, at least for Podiobooks.com, is that MP3 files are getting larger. Back in the day, many of us were concerned about the size of a file, for both storage and bandwidth reasons. Fast-forward a couple of years and […]

No big secret there. Cory has been on the forefront of this movement, giving away free downloads of every single book he publishes. We’re obvious supporters of this methodology, and are proud to have an audio version of his book Eastern Standard Tribe in our repository of free audiobooks.
Cory writes for Locus Magazine (and lots […]

As reported today in The Book Standard:
An electronic textbook website is launching a smelly e-book after finding college students like to be able to smell their books, reports Reuters. A survey of 600 college students conducted by pollster Zogby International found that 43 percent of students identified smell, either a new or old smell, as […]

Reprinted in its entirety from BoingBoing.net
Universal Music — who are usually the most extreme piracyphobes in the music industry — have announced that they’re going to try selling much of their catalog without DRM from now until January. What caused them to change positions? Fear of an iPod Planet.
The iPod plays two kinds of music: […]

I love it when content creators decide to use new ways to distribute material to their audience. Some friends have mine have put together a great looking series of comics and are pushing the .PDF files — for free — down an RSS feed. The first episode dropped today, so go subscribe to the feed!
For […]