Audible is going Hollywood, enlisting a number of accomplished actors–including Annette Bening, Colin Firth, Dustin Hoffman and Kate Winslet–to narrate a new line of audiobooks, featuring many classic works selected by the performers. Scheduled for release beginning in early 2012, the offerings include these pairings: Kim Basinger (The Awakening by Kate Chopin) Annette Bening (Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolfe) Jennifer Connelly (The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles) Colin Firth (The End of the Affair by Graham Greene) Anne Hathaway (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum) Dustin Hoffman (Being There by Jerzy Kosinski) Samuel L. Jackson (A Rage […]
Audio
Audible Looks to Jump-Start Audiobook Production with Entrepreneurial ACX
After a series of industry previews, Audible.com has gone live today with an ambitious new platform designed to both significantly expand the number of published books available in audio and to give rightsholders and audiobook talent a bigger stake in process. Called ACX (Audiobook Creation Exchange), the site is a marketplace for matching the vast pool of books not yet adapted for audio with acting talent and producers, in an entrepreneurial model that lets participants on both sides of the equation work at fixed-rate buyouts or a 50/50 share of back-end proceeds with no upfront costs. Royalties escalate from 50 […]
Amazon Will Finally Work with OverDrive to Let Library Patrons “Borrow” Kindle Books
Library ebook lending looks ready to receive a significant lift as Amazon announced this morning that they will finally work with Overdrive to enable Kindle ebooks for library patrons. The program launches at an unspecified date “later this year.” They say the initiative will work on all Kindle devices as well as of their free ereading apps. (Up until now, Amazon’s Kindle files have been incompatible with Overdrive’s system, which relies on EPUB and Adobe Content Server–neither of which is supported by Amazon.) If a library user creates annotations or bookmarks in a borrowed ebook, those will be preserved by […]
Ingram Pairs with Recorded Books to Go After Overdrive’s Library Audio Service
Ingram put out an elliptical press release yesterday that we have clarified with help from their general manager of Ingram Library Services, Rich Rosy. Recorded Books is launch a platform called OneClickdigital later this quarter to distribute downloadable audiobooks to library patrons, which sounds like an alternative to Overdrive’s established offering. In the announced collaboration, Ingram will distribute other publishers’ audio files through Recorded Books’ new platform, though of course only for those publishers who choose to consent to the platform’s business model. Rosy says “Ingram will add almost 14,000 audio titles from approximately 80 publishers to the platform.” He […]
Two New Audiobook Players Launch
LibiriVox founder Hugh McGuire has launched Iambik Audio, starting today with a list of 11 literary fiction audiobooks from independent presses in the US and Canada, including works from Gordon Lish and Lydia Millet. They sell at “reasonable prices”–from five to ten dollars–with no DRM, so that the files can play on any device. The company is selling directly from their site now and finalizing distribution agreements with partners such as Audible, Overdrive and eMusic. The company’s FAQ indicates they “work almost exclusively on a revenue-share basis, with narrators, publishers/authors, and iambik all sharing in successful audiobooks.” McGuire explains their […]