National Public Radio celebrates with a Reading Of The Declaration of Independence - listen in!

Celebrate with this fun animation video from Pez

July is here - time to plan for ALA! I’ll be part of the three panels below - one each day. Stop in and say hello!

Booklist/Booklist Online: Books and Blogs, Made for Each Other? Saturday 1:30-3:00 McCormick Place West in W-192c. Librarians, readers, publishers, and authors have embraced blogs as a way to locate, learn about, and promote good books to read. Our diverse and distinguished panel of bloggers, including Mary Burkey (Audiobooker), John Green (Brotherhood 2.0), and Kaite Mediatore Stover (Book Group Buzz), and moderated by Booklist Online Senior editor Keir Graff (Likely Stories), will discuss how to use the power of the Web-for the good of books.

Evaluating Audiobooks: Selecting the Best for Children and Teens.

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Read Happy Birthday! The Walkman Turns 30 and see this quote from Martyn Williams on the PCWorld website:

Sony introduced its Walkman portable cassette player thirty years ago this week, kicking off a revolution in the consumer electronics industry by changing the way people enjoy music.

I’d add audiobooks to the revolution, and believe that the combination of Walkman plus car cassette players opened the world of great books to a huge segment of the population. I still have my trusty Walkman, and sometimes wish for the good old days of cassette tapes. You could use the variable speed knob on that Walkman to make the audiobook zoom by 30% faster, with NO chipmunk effect! Thank heavens, I listened to the first five Harry Potters on cassette. I’ve tried the “faster” setting on my iPod, but hate the clipped, echo-y sound. Sigh. Ah, remember the times…

Industry leaders react to APA sales survey results in Spoken-Word Audio Market Holds On, a Publishers Weekly article by Jim Milliot. Thoughtful comments on changes due to the economy, the library & bookstore markets, shifts from CD to downloads, DRM, and the increase in sales of pre-loaded Playway audiobooks.

Web Site Story: a love story for geeks from CollegeHumor:

Thanks to Neatorama for the link!

Share why you support the public library at geekthelibrary.org , an initiative of OCLC and the Bill & Melissa Gates Foundation. Library supporters can learn ways to lobby for library funding, get facts & stats to support their community action, upload their library stories to Flickr or YouTube, and link up via Facebook and Twitter. Creating a library support video would be a perfect teen / tween project for your summer Get Creative @ Your Library theme. There’s even customized Geek gear coming soon - gotta get a “I Geek Audiobooks” T-shirt! Plus, the talking points are a great resource to build community action in times of financial uncertainty. In my home state of Ohio, library supporters have made an amazing show of support, with what looks to be one final day to lobby the state legislature to halt a proposed 50% cut in state library funding. If you are an Ohio voter, be sure to visit Save Ohio Libraries and take action!

Hate ripping titles using iTunes? A free download from Apple can help those with Apple computers: Audiobook Builder. Here’s more from the Apple website:

How do you move Audiobooks to your iPod or iPhone? Do you rip to iTunes, then move every imported track to a special playlist before syncing? That means hundreds of confusing track names cluttering iTunes and your iPod or iPhone, with no way to save your place in a track when you take a break, and working with iTunes’ Import settings just gets old.
Now there’s Audiobook Builder, the easy way to import your Audiobook CDs (or tracks that are already on your Mac), organize them, add enhanced chapter markers and output files that your iPod or iPhone will recognize as actual Audiobooks. The results are automatically sent to a special playlist in iTunes - ready for your next iPod or iPhone sync.

Thanks to Kaite Mediatore Stover for the tip!

Click here for a printable list of 50 books, five magazines, and five audiobooks that make up the Ultimate Teen Bookshelf, named by the American Library Association’s Young Adult Library Services Association. Subscribers to the YALSA-BK electronic discussion list suggested titles for the Ultimate Teen Bookshelf, which were vetted by Pam Spencer Holley and Judy Sasges. Here are the five audiobooks that should be in every YA audiobook collection:

1. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (Recorded Books)
2. Bloody Jack by L.A. Meyer (Listen and Live)
3. The Killer’s Cousin by Nancy Werlin (Brilliance)
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (Caedmon)
5. Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett (HarperAudio)

Twenty top new titles for children & adults were named by the UK’s Audio Publishing Association, as well as 20 notable backlist titles.  US favorites, such as Tea Time for the Traditionally Built and The Graveyard Book appear on the list, as well as distinctly UK titles such as The Last Fighting Tommy by Harry Patch, who at age 110 wrote his life story including his time in the trenches in WWI, and who reads a portion of the audiobook. Always great to have another “best” list to have on hand! Click “Read the rest…” to see the complete list:

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