April 23, 2005

Language Podcast Appendix

We’ve just concluded a truly electric podcast on the subject of language learning websites. I think we had a good time and learned alot too. Now that me and Dave are on our way to becoming true polyglots, we’ve decided you should have the opportunity too. If you listened to the podcast and are interested in visiting some of the sites we mentioned, I thought it might be good to list them all for your web browsing pleasure:

April 21, 2005

Conversations with Neale

Just finished a Neale Donald Walsch Page for you all to enjoy. This is the guy that wrote one of my mother’s favorites “Conversations With God“. Real inspiring story if there ever was one. Here is a guy that is as successful as anyone has a right to be and then comes crashing down hard. I mean hard: we’re talking a car crash that breaks his neck, a fire that destroys all his posessions and a divorce from his fourth wife, all of which happens within a year. Then to top it off he has to be homeless for the better part of a year. Whoa. So what does he do? He writes a note to none other than God, sends it off and gets a reply. Or so he says. I should probably listen to what he has to say before I make a conclusion on his work. Regardless, he’s pulled himself out of that incredible hole and is now quite rich. Not that you’d catch him saying it mattered. Interesting stuff…

April 20, 2005

Publisher Pages

I’ve been working on some publisher pages recently and I felt compelled tonight to write my own meager thoughts on a few of the companies I’ve helped profile.

Sadly these publishers mentioned are out of business.

First I’ll talk about Airplay. These guys may not have much and yes, there is some trash fiction in the mix, but when they’re good, they’re really good. The Jamaica Kincaid books, Poetry selection and Shakespeare titles are all top notch and genuinely unique. There were only 19 titles currently listed on their page, but over half were of high quality and a proceed of the sales go to charity. Pretty cool way of working guys. I give you a thumbs up.

Oh but wait, there’s the best of the best of the publishers I’ve recently encountered. The winner of my personal best publisher of the week is Audio Scholar. I couldn’t believe the titles I was going through with them. Everything had something of value, from Gandhi’s biography to Carl Sagan’s essays; it was all too much to handle! I wanted to listen to every one. If you want to get an idea of their topic range, I think it skews more on the end of science-based books, but there are a few titles devoted to people with more spiritual leanings. I think science is a good niche to take on since there are ALOT of spiritual audio book vendors out there but not many for more… left brain listeners out there.

Check out the links, there’s alot of things in there that I’m sure you’ve never seen on audio before. At least it was new to me!

April 19, 2005

PayPerListen.com

So I was looking at what seems to be Audible’s main competition today. They are PayPerListen.com, the electronic download sector of Audiobooks.com. They’ve about 500 audio books available for download on MP3 from Blackstone Audiobooks, In Audio, Tantor Audio, SoundWorks, Wiley Audio, Full Cast Audio, Hollywood Theater of the Ear, and Penton Overseas. With the exception of SoundWorks (which publishes a lot of famous speeches) all these publishers are already on Audible although PayPerListen seems to have a few more titles from each of them and they may have different ones. PayPerListen’s main advantage over Audible for us consumers is that if you aren’t an Audible member and you’re just buying digital audio books a la carte, PayPerListen seems to sell their downloads about $5-$10 cheaper than Audible. But check because it varies and a few times PayPerListen was more expensive when I browsed.

Downloading seems easy enough even though you have to wait for a confirmation e-mail before you can download it. They have to clear your payment first and then they send you a link with a user name and password and you then have access to you audio book which comes in 1 hour MP3 segments you download. So unlike Audible you don’t have to download any software to download the audio books. Like Audible once you’ve purchased the audio books they are always in “Your Library” so you can go back and download them again or you can download them in segments at a time.

PayPerListen.com’s downloads are encoded MP3s as opposed to Audible’s AA audio. Audible’s audio put the audio book right in the Audiobook section of your iPod if you have one so that you can bookmark it there. PayPerListen’s MP3s can be uploaded on to any MP3 portable player. They did mention though that because of a deal they made with publishers that you can’t burn their encoded MP3s onto CD which is most likely bad for those who want to download their audio books and burn them to CD. You can come to your own conclusion on PayPerListen.com’s browseability with its dozens of categories but they have a nice advanced search. So it’s good Audible has a competitor. Tomorrow I’ll tell you a little about the Spoken Network which is another up and comer in digital downloading. Until then LearnOutLoud.com!

April 19, 2005

Stephen R. Covey Author Page is Up

Take a look at the Stephen R. Covey page I just put up. This guy is the grandfather of 43 separate human beings. While this is an already formidable accomplishment, Covey has fortunately managed to put out some inspiring audio books as well. Additionally, he’s a regular on the self development seminar circuit and a prescence in Washington. All this AND he looks to be an amazing parent. His site www.franklincovey.com is worth checking out too: He doesn’t just sell his books, but office supplies and journals as well.

April 16, 2005

Resources & Content Are Up

We’ve got our Resources and our Content Up. You can check each section out at:

https://www.learnoutloud.com/Resources

-and-

https://www.learnoutloud.com/Content

And it is just the start of those sections. They will expand infinitely in the next months to further meet your audio & video learning needs.

April 15, 2005

Radio Ruminations

I’ve been thinking alot about how radio is changing. I think with my antenna on the fritz in my car, I’ve decided it’s a waste of time to even try to listen to it the old way and thus lately I’ve been listening to it on streaming audio via the web. I didn’t realize I was a junkie until recently the other day I got angry that my real player wasn’t working. This is just like getting a bad signal during a good program: you just want to hit the dashboard. At least I do because I’m a violent person. 🙂 Anyway, with podcasts and streaming audio, the old transistor is probably going to die. Yes, I’ll repeat it, DIE. But that’s ok because it doesn’t mean radio’s relevance is dead. Quite the contrary, I hold it quite dear as a resource that not only informs me on the daily news, but gives me music reccomendations and gets me up to date on every topic I could ever need. Put succinctly: content is more important than the vehicle of said content. Bring on the digital man, it only makes for better choices.

FYI: if your interested in what I listen to daily I’ll give you a brief rundown. I start my day around 9:30. By 10 AM I listen to the Al Franken Show on Air America. At around noon I feel like music usually so I go to Minnesota Public Radio’s INCREDIBLE 89.3 The Current. After that I usually spend the afternoon listening to either my local KCRW station or if I’m bored with that I go to Wisconsin’s Idea Network. Yes, I’m an NPR fan. Deal. Oh yeah and I don’t forget Adam Curry’s mainstay Podcast, The Daily Sourcecode.

April 14, 2005

Dangerously Close to Extreme Resources

Danger Audio Learning Lovers. Our Resources section is about to EXPLODE onto the scene. We’ve entered in dozens of authors and publisher pages we’re just wrapping up the navigation to them so you can get to them. I personally don’t know of a resource quite like it and I have been on a quest for such a thing for the last year or so. In all fairness there are some sites doing similar things, but nothing quite like us I don’t think. Anyway here’s the LearnOutLoud.com “competition”. But I prefer to call them allies in the quest to make us all LearnOutLoud! Here’s what I’ve found:

AudioFile Magazine

-It’s the Number One site for professional Audiobook Reviews on the Net. An online archive of over 16,000 reviews many of which are free but many of which you must be an AudioFile Plus suscriber to access and that costs $48/year which also gets you 6 issues of their printed AudioFile Magazine and their Audiobook Reference Guide which I’ve used extensively. I thought the Audiobook Reference Guide was going to be like a Videohound for audio books, but it turned out to be an 80 page booklet listing Audiobook Publishers & Distributors which was very useful for us to use but not necessarily useful to the average audio book listener. But maybe it is. I won’t go into their site any further, but it pretty much rocks for audio book lovers and I’ll let you look for yourself. Here’s a pretty nice link to a publisher resources page they have:

http://www.audiofilemagazine.com/other_resources.cfm

Audiobook Café

Where Spoken Word is Spoken About. Heck Yeah. And I see they have a whole MP3 Audio Archive of Interviews with Authors, Reviews & Excerpts from Audio Books, and their Radio Show: Coffee & Conversation all which you can download for free. How have I not downloaded this stuff?! And then they have what appears to be 1000s of print articles, interviews, reviews, and so much more. And they’ve even got forums which I just posted in. What a great resource!

AudioBook News Service

-Tons of free reviews with links to the publishers that sell the items. Awesome.

And here’s some other sites which you can make up your own mind about:

http://www.discoveraudiobooks.com
http://www.audiobook.ws
http://www.webaudiobooks.com
http://www.audiobooksguide.com
http://www.rentbooksontape.com
http://abcentral.conforums.com
http://www.terrypogue.com (lot of dead links here)

Ok. Check ’em out. And check our Resources section out too.

April 12, 2005

New Author Pages Up!

It’s been a busy weekend for me at the LOL HQ. I’ve been sweating and refining over a series of truly unique (and beautiful!) author pages. I’ve been reading alot of biographies and pouring over countless bibliography pages so you don’t have to. What’s the point of going to a retailer page and not getting a good idea of everything available by an author? We’re trying to remedy that at LearnOutLoud.com. You’ll find alot of different and varied authors such as one for the dapper fellow pictured to the right. This man is American Hero Tom Wolfe. Here he is pictured in one of his many awesome white suits (he must have a bright closet). I think he’s doing some gardening or something similarly austere while thinking up his next society-skewering opus. Go for it Tom, yeah!

Anyway, I hope you get as much from these pages as I have in compiling them. I’ve actually sought out many of the authors that have interested me here so I can assure you that these pages have practical value. If only I had had more of these when I was in highschool. I would have been a genuis alot earlier. Here’s the latest batch of authors; look around and tell me if I can add anything or am totally off base with my findings:

April 12, 2005

Free Audio Books!

Everybody wants free audio books. No matter what place I’m finding the audio book lover I’m also finding the guy or gal who wants it all and wants it now and wants it real free. I like the reply of most audiobook lovers to these people. Dude go to the library. And I do go to the library and you should too. But the audio book selection at the library can suffer from time to time. And your iPod is sitting there without any fresh audio book downloads on it. So you want some audio books and you want to download them right now for free. Well then check some of this out:

FreeAudio.org
Project Gutenberg
Free Classic Audio Books
Audiobooks for Free

And I always remember to tell people on that last one to click the AK-47 at the top of the page. If you don’t you’re missing out big time.

So that’s free folks. It’s usually public domain which means the titles it offers were published before you were born. And there’s some other free sites with 1000s of titles where a computer reads eBooks to you. Bad idea. But that Free Classic Audio Books listed above is a computer narrated audio book site with pretty decent narration. It’s still cold and inhuman, but as the computer evolves it will eventually put to rest the need for a Frank Mueller. Capturing all the subtleties of human emotion and speech this neuro-scientific supercomputer will put to rest the days of narrators and then there will be a massive free flow of computer talking books on demand at the click of a button and we’ll be so awash in a sea of aural information that our brains will explode. Until that day enjoy the few free downloads available.