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I am taking part in the Share a Story, Shape a Future event the week of March 9-13, blogging about the role of audiobooks in children’s literacy. Here’s the week’s line up – be sure to stop in! Day 1: Raising Readers hosted by Terry Doherty at Scrub-a-Dub-Tub, the Reading Tub blog Finding Time at [...]

Well, it looks as though Amazon has thought twice about the text-to-speech Kindle 2 capabilities. Here is an update from Business Wire where Amazon says: Therefore, we are modifying our systems so that rightsholders can decide on a title by title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title. We have [...]

Author, audiobook narrator, and actor extraordinaire Wil Wheaton takes on the whole kerfuffle (worthy of a NYT opinion from Roy Blount) on how the Kindle 2′s text-to-speech capability of any book downloaded on the eBook reader does/does not violate the book author’s rights. Wheaton created a ten-minute human vs. machine smackdown. Here’s what he says: [...]

Here’s another great audiobook blog to explore – this time from Recorded Books: http://recordedbooks.wordpress.com/ Especially useful for educators & school librarians, the RB blog has frequent posts that have free downloads, classroom resources, research on audioboooks, author interviews, and lots more. They even had a batch of audiobook valentines for printing. Recorded Books is also [...]

There’s a new audiobook blog: Just Press Play, from Playaway’s Senior Manager for Content Strategy David Perrotta. Stop by to see which titles from the ALA Media Awards are available on Playaway. And Perrotta isn’t afraid to delve into librarian-talk, such as his post on MARC: Is Playaway a Sound Recording or an Electronic Resource? [...]

Yup – a $10 Talking Book. That’s the project of Literacy Bridge, a non-profit group based in Seattle, Washington whose mission is “to empower children and adults with tools for knowledge sharing and literacy learning, as an effective means towards advancing education, health, economic development, democracy, and human rights.” Here’s more: The Talking Book Device [...]

Last week I spoke with Judith Rosen as she prepared her Publisher’s Weekly article “Taking Steps into the Digital Future.” Rosen provides a careful & thorough look at the opportunities and challenges of digital publishing for children and young adults. Yet the article’s spotlight focuses primarily on eBooks while addressing audio in only three quotes. [...]

Thanks to a comment left by D. Wittkower, I learned about Traveling Classics, a very interesting new player in the  Text Synchronized Audiobook market. If you’d like to try this Apple app for free, check here for a free Friday the thirteenth download of The Tell-Tale Heart! UPDATE: Traveling Classics will keep the Tell-tale Heart as a [...]

This month’s New York Times Fiction Podcast : Roger Angell reads John Updike’s short story “Playing with Dynamite,” and talks with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, about editing Updike.

In the buzz about the new Kindle 2, you might have missed an interesting feature: Read to Me. Here’s the scoop from the Amazon press release: New Experimental Read-To-Me Feature Kindle 2 offers the experimental read-to-me feature “Text-to-Speech” that converts words on a page to spoken word so customers have the option to read or [...]