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 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 11, 2005

Tips for Audio Learning

I’ve been scouring forums at iPod lounge and just wanted to share some points of interest on the nature of audio book listening:

“Do you exercise, mow the lawn (special ear buds necessary), run errands, clean out the garage, clean out closets, sit in the bright sunlight of a beach or pool where reading is difficult, etc? If you do even a few of these, you would be surprised how much time you can clock every month. As long as an activity is not mentally consuming or involves other people, why not capitalize on that time to listen to a book. Also, sounds like you might prefer sitting in a chair and listen to a book — I do that myself when into an engrossing book.”

“Actually, reading a book makes me very sleepy. When I sit down to read, I’ll more often than not be able to read only a few pages, without much comprehension, before I feel like sleeping. On the other hand, while listening to a book, I can move around and do things like work out, laundry, dishes, drive, etc.”

“I listen to audio books while, driving, exercising, doing yard work, housework, anything that does not require concentration to the other task.”

“I find there is a thin line where you can focus on the audible book and perform another task simultaniously, and perform both well. There seem to be an inbetween brain state where I can drive, work, etc. and listen to a book. If I am not in that place the book goes into the back ground or the task suffers. It’s hard to explain, but there a place I can go to where I can multitask. I find as I get older the line gets thinner and thinner.”

“I listen to audio books when I go to bed. I do a 15 minute sleep timer EVERY night. Sometimes I’ll do 30 minutes. I usually fall asleep in about 5 minutes. But it’s such a great way to get to sleep. Other than that, I try to pick some sort of house project to work on at night – sewing curtains, re-wiring a switch, painting a room, building shelves, etc – that is a perfect time for the books.”

So there you go. Learn Out Loud.

April 8, 2005

Kiyosaki and Some Audio Book Forums You Should Enliven

Heya, today I put up the Robert T. Kiyosaki page for all you guys and gals that are wondering how to handle your money. The Rich Dad series is quite, quite… QUITE extensive and could probably make anyone rich if they listened to it enough. Hope this page is of some help!

I’m also going to give you some links to some web forums me and David have been haunting this week. Some of them could use a little new blood and I think the good people visiting our site are just the kind of well, blood that needs to be put into these forums.

The first one I want to point your direction to is Audio Books Central. This site has quite a few members but the traffic ain’t so hot. Nobody responds to me and I’m getting lonely. There’s some good topics however and its a shame people are picking up the baton a little more over there.

The next one I’ve been looking at is the MSN message Board On Audio Books. This one has a real proffessional layout and it informs me of when I’ve got replies via my email address. Real handy. Me and David have been talking on this one alot.

Then there’s a new monster: the ipod lounge forums. This one is so busy and so cool that you could probably spend a day posting on it. In fact, I think david just did today. Excessive, but fun. I reccomend this one the most, not only if you want to talk about audio books in the spoken word section, but also if you have any (and I mean ANY) concern with regards to your IPOD. Don’t worry, I don’t have an Ipod yet either and I’m still finding ways to be relevent on this forum. Go there right away!

Hope all is well friends. I’m going to go jog now and get the rest of the day’s light before it gets too dark. Bye.

April 6, 2005

Found a Great Forum For iPod Audio Book Listeners

Today I found some very popular forums at www.ipodlounge.com. This site looks like an awesome resource for iPod lovers and I’ve just begun to look at it. I downloaded their free 2005 iPod Lounge Buyers’ Guide. And I also checked out their Books and Spoken Word section in their forums which discuss Books on CD, Audible.com, and Podcasts all relating to your iPod. Check out the forums for yourself: http://forums.ipodlounge.com

April 6, 2005

Audio Samples On The Web

We’ve been recording some podcasts recently and to spice things up a bit we’ve been giving a showcase of a few handpicked audio samples culled from various web resources. Not every retailer has an audio sample of a given book so it became a search that yielded only a few results. I want to give you a look at the websites that offer samples. As you’ll see, some of them offer an extensive selection (audible) while others are just plain paltry (Audio Renaissance)

First off we’ll start with the aforementioned audible.com. They basically have every title they carry repleat with a good sample Most are good quality here’s one for “America: The Audiobook ”

By far the most generous with their audio samples is Nightingale Conant’s website. They offer multiple samples from a given book with added bonus of each sample being an average of about 15 minutes long. You basically can hear the whole book at that rate. Quality is crummy but you get what you pay for on this count. Here’s some words of wisdom from Brian Tracy’s “The Power Of Clarity”

By far the worst supplier of audio books is Audio Rensaissance. I hate to rage on AR because I believe they are one of the best providers of quality audio books and lets face it, audio samples are a perk, not a normal feature. Nevertheless, they have nothing more than a small page of samples for their newer releases. This is great if you want to hear a brand new hot off the press best seller, but now if you want to hear one of their more obscure titles. Audible just plain beats them to the punch. Here’s a look at their page for audio samples.

Anyway, I just wanted to give you a brief look at what’s out there. There are only a few more pages that offer samples. There are a few retailers and publishers that offer samples for select titles. The most notable and comprehensive providers are: Blackstone Audio, Harper Collins, and Time Warner Audio. If you look through their catalogues, you’ll see many if not most offer samples. I do think this is a unique and cool feature every retailer/publisher should offer. It not only gives a better example of what you’re about to buy, but it also utilizes the medium in a special way unique to its strengths. Yeah. Hope this was of some help.

April 4, 2005

Author Pages Are Up!

Been alot going on over here at the Learn Out Loud HQ. On my end, the week’s work was putting up some author pages which when all is said and done are probably the best resource I could possibly invent for finding every audio resource by a given author. You even get a nice biographical sketch researched by yours truly and a snazzy picture. I want to give you all a set of links for the current pages that are up. So without further blabbering here you are:

Dan Millman
Joseph Campbell
Wayne Dyer
Tom Peters
Andrew Weil
Zig Ziglar
The Dalai Lama
Deepak Chopra

Below the biographies you will see 2 or three featured items and then a list of every title I compiled by each other. This list was culled from every online audio book retailer I have at my disposal (the list is growing geometrically), and many of them are titles offered only by the author. So hopefully you’ll find some things there that you didn’t know existed before. Enjoy!

April 3, 2005

Rental Sites

Just about every week or so I come across a new audiobook rental site most of which are designed like a Netflix scenario where you get a certain number at a time with no late fees and you pay a certain amount a month. Here I thought I’d list them off so anyone can check them out. Of course we’ll be writing up detailed pages on all these sites very soon and probably an article comparing and contrasting them to see what might be best. Here’s what I’ve found so far and you can click on them to check them out:

Simply Audiobooks
Audio Adventures
Audio to Go
Booksfree.com
Jiggerbug
Audio Queue
Audio Book Club

And the one I found today:

Kitabe

Booksfree.com and Kitabe are MP3-CD based which I’m sure cuts down on their shipping costs since you can fit a whole audiobook on one MP3-CD. But you’d need a MP3-CD player or maybe you can transfer them to your iPod and how many good audio books are available on MP3-CD? We’ll find out for you.