Archive for the 'Industry news' Category

New version of The Levelator posted

Monday, September 17th, 2007

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 [...]

Books should never go out of print

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

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 [...]

Shrink my tunes?

Monday, September 10th, 2007

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 [...]

Cory Doctorow says free downloads increase sales

Friday, September 7th, 2007

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 [...]

eTexbook seller fails logic test

Friday, August 24th, 2007

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, [...]

Universal tries out DRM-free music

Friday, August 10th, 2007

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 [...]

New comic to be distributed via podcast

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

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! [...]

Do you follow our Twitter posts?

Wednesday, July 18th, 2007

In the last two days, it seems like mass media has “discovered” the magic of Twitter. I just finished reading a New York Times article that declared Second Life dead, but praised Twitter. Interesting. I’m a fan of Twitter, and we use it heavily here on Podiobooks.com. With every new book launched and every new [...]

Book video channels

Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

Simon & Schuster recently introduced a video channel on YouTube. As of this posting, there are 18 videos on the site featuring the authors discussing their books, interviews and the like. It’s interesting to note that traditional publishers are looking at social media sites more and more as ways to raise awareness of their products. [...]