Publisher and Director of Hachette Audiobooks, Anthony Goff has had his finger on the play button of many titles nominated for recognition at the Audies Award ceremony. But Goff doesn’t keep his enthusiasm for the audiobook publishing field contained at the office. He’s the immediate past President of the Audio Publishers Association, and currently serves on the APA Board of Directors along with last week’s “Inside the Audiobook Studio” guest Michele Cobb. Michele, who is also a past President of APA, and Anthony are two of the audiobook community’s most articulate advocates, and it is an honor to have had them both as guests!

I decided to invite Anthony to be our guest here on “Inside the Audiobook Studio” when I read the New York Times story on Hachette’s Dickensian serialized podcast release on iTunes  of Transition by Iain M. Banks, as an abridgment divided into 23 episodes. These free episodes served as a novel  promotion for the full-length audiobook release – and I love seeing great ways to introduce audiobooks to new listeners. Let’s hear what else Anthony has to share with us here in the interview seat…

1.    What’s on your MP3 player?
Right now I am listening to NurtureShock by NYT Bestselling author Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, read by Po Bronson. He’s an amazing writer and fantastic narrator of his own works. It’s a timeless classic in my eyes that is the parenting book for those who don’t have time to read parenting books. Some great hot topics touched upon are the chapters “Inverse Power of Praise” (which Po and Ashley used to headline an award-winning piece in New York Magazine “Children and Race”) and “Why Kids Lie,” why even some from the best of upbringings end up aggressive, if not outright cruel…Fascinating stuff. I just finished listening to End the Fed by Ron Paul: talk about controversial, timely, and from the heart…In queue is Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, now available as an unabridged audiobook for the first time featuring narration by author David Foster Wallace, and the multi-cast of the film, including Director John Krasinski. Saw the just-released movie and some of the scenes actually (in my unbiased view) were better acted on our audiobook! ; )

2.    Tell us about your role in the audiobook community.
I’m so happy to be involved in such a passionate community. Yes, everyone has multiple job functions, but everyone cares so much about the format that going home feeling worn out many days is merely a sign that we continue to wage the battle of growing the audience while putting out the highest quality audio recordings to hook new fans. The work NEVER ends, but neither do the opportunities to promote, nor the fun of it all! Serving as APA President was truly an honor. The highlights of my term were introducing Audies judging to digital listening for reviewing product, and reorganizing the Audies Gala to be a bit more succinct in a theater style setting. I continue to work on/with the Board of Directors, who in my mind are a select group of the most dedicated spirits in the industry.

3.    What was your most interesting/embarrassing/hilarious moment in the audiobook studio?
I was once running a Q&A with Bill Bonanno (son of mafia Boss Joseph Bonanno), and Joe Pistone (alias Donnie Brasco of the FBI), and interviewing them after hours in a small, dark studio off of Times Square. Mr. Bonnano, “Sir” as I affectionately referred to him, turns to me (this after they were lost in Times Sq. and could not fine the studio for quite some time) and said “Who the hell wrote these questions!?! This is some real Hollywood Bullsh*t!” I laughed (instead of crying) and immediate ratted out our LA Producer that wrote the script, not by name of course. Then quickly said “Let’s just talk about whatever you guys want!”

4.     What future trends or changing technologies do you think will have the greatest/worst/revolutionary impact on the audiobook production field?
Delivering audiobooks to consumers so they can listen everywhere they are, anytime they want is something that I feel would have a significant impact on the industry. Being device agnostic from couch, to car, to gym, would be a coup. Easy access, easy use is key. I’ll just keep it simple.

5.    What’s new and exciting in your part of the audiobook community?
We here at Hachette geared up for fall in a big way, and have been blessed with an embarrassment of riches. From Ted Kennedy’s memoir True Compass, to Oprah’s selection of Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan, the great world-wide philanthropic effort of Nelson Mandela’s Favorite African Folktales – never mind blockbusters from James Patterson, David Baldacci, Anita Shreve, Michael Connelly, Malcolm Gladwell, Sheri Shepherd, David Cross, and now a new live audiobook exclusive from David Sedaris entitled Live for Your Listening Pleasure (which will also be available on vinyl). Hachette Audio truly has something for everyone this coming holiday season!

Gosh, Anthony – I guess we’re lucky that you weren’t sent to sleep with the fishes, and that the directions were good for your visit here to “Inside the Audiobook Studio.” And I can’t wait for the VINYL version of the Sedaris title. I’ll bet Arnie Cardillo (who bemoaned the death of vinyl audiobooks in his interview here) will be thrilled to get his ears on it, too. Thanks so much for being our guest – and I’ll be looking for you at the Audies this year!

Did you catch this story by Ann Oldenberg from USA Today? Audiobook producer Elisa Shokoff shares the story of recording Swayze & wife Lisa Niemi’s autobiography The Time of My Life in the last days of Swayze’s life. Sure to be high demand for this Simon & Schuster Audio title from Swayze’s fans and from families who are also dealing with cancer.

Author Amy Huntley shares her thoughts on the “reading or cheating” audiobook debate. What a wonderful boost for educators who integrate audiobooks in their reading & language arts instruction! I’m printing this out to add to my file of audiobook research and forwarding to those who need ammunition in combating resistance to listing to literature. Learn more about Amy, author of The Everafter, in this “Inside the Audiobook Studio” interview.” Thank you so much, Amy, for being today’s guest blogger here at Audiobooker!

Why One English Teacher Values the Audiobook

I’ve long enjoyed listening to audiobooks. Most often I listen to them when I’m in the car, but I also like to listen to them at night as I’m falling asleep. Perhaps that’s a carryover from the very-long-gone days of my childhood when my parents read to me at night. But whatever the reason, I’ve enjoyed listening to stories for a long time.

I have to admit, though, that for years I have—in varying degrees—accepted society’s prejudice against the audiobook, thinking it not quite of the same caliber as the experience of “reading” a written text. I haven’t been nearly as prejudiced as some people, some…Ah-hummm, English teachers. But still, it’s hard to overcome the kind of preference for written text that’s been long embedded in our educational institutions.

I taught a class this past year, though, which pushed through those final barriers of prejudice for me.  I had a group of remedial tenth graders who informed me that they hated to read. They had always hated to read. There was nothing they hated more than reading.  If they’d had the words “loath” and “detest” in their somewhat limited lexicons, I’m sure they’d have emerged among that class’ loud assertions about the evils of reading.

This group of students was also one of the most difficult groups I had ever had when it came to controlling their impulses. They had very little understanding of what a classroom was supposed to be, why it was set up the way it was, or what the purpose of schooling was period. At least for them.

And I discovered that the ONLY tool I had in my teacher toolbox that could calm these students down and get them to stop hurting themselves and others was…to read to them. I’ve often had to read to groups of remedial students over the years. It’s something I love doing. But this group was different. For the survival of everyone in that classroom, I had to do far more reading aloud than usual.

Amazing things happened when I read to this group. They didn’t just listen, although they did do that. They asked questions. They clarified text.  They made predictions. They commented on the choices characters were making. They connected what characters were doing with the choices they made in their own lives.

In short, they were doing everything that “readers” do. Everything that English teachers hope “readers” will do. Even when it got hard.

Toward the end of the year, I finally said to this group, “You know, you guys are readers. You truly are.”

So loud were their angry protestations at being so “misread” by me after ten months of our being together that I thought they would shout me right out the door. I calmed them down enough to explain what readers do when reading. And to point out that they did everyone of those things whenever I read to them.

“Yeah, but that’s not reading,” one of them protested. “We can only do that if you read to us.”

“So what?” I said.  “That’s still reading. You guys love stories. You love hearing them. So listen to them. Read audiobooks. I bet you’ll turn in to lifelong readers.”

“That’s not reading,” they continued to assert.

So strenuously did I have to argue with them about this that the last vestiges of my own prejudice began to disintegrate. I knew I’d obliterated it completely when, in the course of the argument, I said, “Hey, you guys, my sister-in-law is blind. The only access she has to books is audiobooks. She listens to them regularly. All the time. Loves them. We talk about books with each other because she listens to them and I run my eyeballs over the pages. Are you going to tell me that she’s not a ‘reader’?”

They were stumped.

So was I. I’d just argued myself into a whole new way of thinking.

I’m going to work harder at getting all my students to realize that audiobooking is ‘reading’. Maybe I need a new word for the other process—that one where the eyeball scans the page. Maybe that will help break down the walls of prejudice that remain against audiobooking. As a society, we need to allow the word “reading” to apply as much to listening to text as to using our eyes to take it in.  We need to abolish that prejudice that says, “Yeah, but when someone else reads the text to you, they’re interpreting it, so you’re not really having the true reading experience.” Seriously? How did written text get so much status? We don’t hold that prejudice when it comes to attending a play. What’s that if not an interpretation of written text? Did Homer’s listeners think, “Yeah, but he’s interpreting our mythology for us, so this is less valid than if he’d just write it out and let us read it”?

Audiobooking is reading. I want students to read. I want students to have the words “detest” and “loath” in their vocabularies so they can apply it as much to narrow definitions of reading as to anything else they want to. And if they get that from reading audiobooks…

Wonderful.

© Amy Huntley, 2009

In a dual narrative, we follow both Willie Shakespeare Greenberg, a perpetually stoned graduate student, and the young playwright himself… Bawdy puns, a clever construction, and a deliciously irreverent sense of humor make this debut novel irresistible.

My Name Is Will – Making the Audiobook from Hughes Hall on Vimeo.

The home of 2,557 audiobooks in 26 languages – all FREE. Hugh McGuire launched the volunteer-effort audiobook publishing model LibriVox on August 10^th, 2005. Hugh is this week’s Inside the Audiobook Studio guest, ready to share the background on this amazing project. Want more information on LibriVox? Subscribe to the Community Podcast here. Have you always wanted to be an audiobook narrator – or perhaps want to challenge students to develop their oral performance skills? Are you an aspiring audio editor and need some practice? Try your talents by becoming a LibriVox volunteer! Want to learn how to slow down the LibriVox audiobooks? Searching for a list of recommended best FREE LibriVox titles? You’ll find answers to all things LibriVox on the LibriVox Wiki.

Ok, Hugh, let’s get started…

1. What’s on your MP3 player?

I’ve been listening to Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins. So far, excellent. I’ve also got the Iliad, and Don Quioxte, plus a bunch of music, and gobs of podcasts – NYTimes Books Podcast, Australia Radio National’s All in the Mind, NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and TimesOnline’s The Bugle, among many many others.

2. Tell us about your role in the audiobook community.

Well, I am the founder of LibriVox – my wife calls me the mayor of LibriVox. I have a new venture, BookOven.com, which is taking lots of energy (trying to transform the publishing industry is hard work!), so I have less time these days for LibriVox than I used to. But I still check into the forums daily. I mostly just try to make sure there are no major problems; and if there are I try to help find solutions for them. It seems like LibriVox is pretty solid now, and we seem to have fewer problems than we used to. The problems I try to solve are often helping manage disagreements about how things ought to be done in LibriVox – it’s a big, open project, so there is lots of input, and sometimes channeling all that discussion is a challenge. But there’s also answering the odd email from copyright lawyers, and thinking about paying for servers etc. As for my own responsibilities in creating audiobooks – I have none. I don’t get much recording done these days, and I’m not too involved in the nitty gritty of making audiobooks. I’m happiest doing what I can to make sure that all the people involved in LibriVox are happy contributing in ways they like to contribute.

LibriVox is a project that gets volunteers around the world to make audio versions of public domain books, and make them available for free on the internet. Our objective is:

“To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.”

Anyone can volunteer for us – you just have to have a computer, an internet connection, some free software, a cheap microphone, and the desire to record audiobooks. Or, you might help us out in other ways. We are, we think, the most prolific audiobook publisher in the world – we put out 60-100 books a month. We have a catalog of 2,547 works in 26 languages, including: Austen, Einstein, Twain, Sun Tzu, Nietzsche, Sayers, Poe, Bronte, Cervantes, Descartes, Plato, Dante, Goethe, Homer … etc etc etc. All available for free. Some of our books are recorded by a group of volunteers; half of them are solo recordings. In order to listen, you can download mp3s from our site, or from the Internet Archive, and listen on your computer, iPod, or MP3 player.

3.   What was your most interesting/embarrassing/hilarious moment in the audiobook studio?

My first recording for LibriVox! I had no idea what I was doing. I used a ca. 2001 Mac iBook laptop, and its pinhole mic. I did not rehearse, and I stumbled like crazy. You can listen to the recording here, if you like, Chapter 1 of The Secret Agent: http://librivox.org/the-secret-agent-by-joseph-conrad/

4. What future trends or changing technologies do you think will have the greatest/worst/revolutionary impact on the audiobook production field?

Well, I think we’ll see more people making audiobooks. Digital means that you can get excellent quality without spending an arm and a leg on equipment or studios, so that means that the range of books that are commercially viable will get bigger.

And the big thing will be when car stereos are better integrated with iPods & digital media players: once that happens, the ease of downloading MP3s will really have a huge advantage over CDs, and I think we’ll see an explosion in audiobook listening & demand.

5.   What’s new and exciting in your part of the audiobook community?

Well, we have not done a full survey of all existing public domain texts in all languages, but with 2,547 completed books, I think it’s fair to say we have a way to go to reach our objective of recording all of them. So I don’t think there is much all that new … we’re just plugging away!

Thanks for being our guest on this week’s Inside the Audiobook Studio, Hugh! Keep in touch with Hugh on the BookOven blog at http://blog.bookoven.com/ or on Twitter @bookoven

If you’d like to find out more about Hugh’s vision for a new model of publishing, watch his presentation at the BookNetCanada Tech Forum or watch this video from http://geekcast.fm/

Subtract the illustrations from The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, add the author’s narration and what do you get? This year’s Odyssey Award-winning title recognized as the best in audiobook production. Audiobooks for young listeners have long featured the audio rendition of text plus added music & effects. But what about audiobooks of titles for older readers minus the illustrations, as in the Absolutely True Diary or Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules? Even the Caldecott-winning, 550 page novel in words and pictures, The Invention of Hugo Cabret was re-imagined as an audiobook featuring music & sound effects. The Booklist audiobook  review addresses some of the concerns of this comment about Hugo posted on an eariler Audiobooker post:

Is it just me, or is there something really off about the idea of an audio version of Hugo Cabret? Half of the book’s glory (hell, half of the book period) is the illustrations.

There was a similar reaction when the Hugo audiobook was debated on Roger Sutton’s blog, including the response post by author Selznick below on the topic:

I’m never quite sure if an author is supposed to comment about their own work on a blog, but I’ve enjoyed Roger’s blog in the past and just came across this discussion of the audiobook. I wanted to say that I had the same reservations about the idea of an audio book for Hugo…it seemed that the whole point of the book is that it is told with pictures to reference it’s relationship to early movies. But I’ll tell you the reason I said yes (and worked hard with the producers) on this audio project. In 1931, sound was a new thing to the movies (having been introduced of course in The Jazz Singer in 1927), but directors such as Rene Clair thought that sound might ruin movies. He believed that movies were essentially a visual medium, and that sound would make the storytelling too easy. So (for example) in a movie he made in 1931, Under the Roofs of Paris, he used sound sporadically, experimentally, and left the rest of the movie “silent.” This actually was part of the inspiration for having the bursts of images in Hugo (it would parallel the bursts of sound in Clair’s film). SO, when the idea of the audio version of the book was introduced, I was intrigued by the idea of how to use sound the way Clair did. The structure of the audio book is very much like the actual book, in that there are two distinct ways of storytelling working together (hopefully) to tell the tale. We worked really hard to make listening to Hugo its own distinct experience. Yes, it’s different from the book, but the ultimate goal of it was the same, and for me I know I wouldn’t have undertaken the project if there wasn’t something unique that the audio book could do that was different from the book.
Oh, and the DVD is completely separate from the storytelling. It’s a half hour interview with me about making the book, and there is a section where you can see the picture sequences while I talk about the research and ideas that went into drawing them, kind of like a director’s commentary on a movie DVD. But the DVD is really just a bonus. The story exists entirely on the audio CD.
Hope this clarifies some of the ideas behind the audiobook.

Author Augusten Burroughs discusses his re-imagined adult audiobook “A Wolf at the Table” in this video from Macmillan Audio. I’m glad that audiobooks for grown-ups are experimenting with adding music & sound effects. But what are your feelings about titles that depend solely on sound, music, or the voice of a great narrator to convey the spirit of an illustrated tale? Great or ghastly? Does the listener’s impression depend on whether they listen with fresh ears or have experienced the print title first? I am curious in what your comments will say about titles like The Book Thief or The Wright 3 !

The general feeling of the session participants was that blog readers are commenting less these days, not so much from lack of interest but because of the ever-increasing flood of information. But there are times when comments create results. Here’s an example for Audiobooker readers: AppSessions responds to your concerns posted as comments to this post on text-synchronized audiobooks. If you’ve experienced problems with iClassix, here’s what to do:

Hello everyone. I am the managing partner at appSessions. I am so sorry to hear about the scroll issue. We are in the process of completely revamping our software. I assure all of you that once these updates are complete, you will all be pleased with the result. You will all get an upgrade of the current book you have on the iPhone. Secondly, because of the inconvenience, I would like to offer all of you on the this board who have had issues to please email me once the update is complete and I will offer you a complementry title of your choice. We are here to provide you with the best reading experience and once these updates are complete, I am sure you will agree with me on this notion. I am sorry about the problems, but rest assure, these will be resolved in a few weeks time. Please email me with any questions and or concerns.

Thank you.

Amirreza Vaziri

vaziri.amirreza@gmail.com

Audio, video, lesson plans & more available for free at Teaching Books.net. Here’s more from TeachingBook’s founder, Nick Glass:

A few weeks ago I posted a request for a few hard-to-find cover images of books that were recognized by the Coretta Scott King Book Award. Needless to say, ALSC colleagues came through — generously scanning and emailing these images to me.  Thanks!  From the link below you can now browse through a database that has cover images of all 231 books that have ever been recognized by the Coretta Scott King Book Award in its 40 years of existence.

Besides the book covers, though, are over 250 new, original audio recordings with as many of the recipients that we could reach — as well as a collection of all online resources about these books, authors, and illustrators.  All of this is completely free to use, share, and link to.

From our announcement at ALA when we launched this resource, “The Coretta Scott King Book Award Curriculum Resource Center contains more than eight hours of originally produced audio with award-winning authors and illustrators, presented in accessible, two- to three-minute clips. Searches can be executed by author, illustrator, title, grade level, and curriculum area, as well as by the year or specific Coretta Scott King Book Award citation.

In addition to free, online primary source materials (audio recordings and book readings), the collection features hundreds of lesson plans and original movies filmed in the studios of some of the award-winning authors and illustrators.

Among the more than 250 recordings are Dr. Maya Angelou and George Ford-two of the first recipients of the award in the early 1970s-as well as Dr. Toni Morrison, Walter Dean Myers, Kadir Nelson, Faith Ringgold, and Jacqueline Woodson, some of the most famous and successful recipients.

This Curriculum Resource Center was created by TeachingBooks.net with the support of the Coretta Scott King Book Award 40th Anniversary Public Awareness Campaign Committee. Special thanks to the committee and the co-chairs Andrea Davis Pinkney and Deborah Taylor. Thanks to Satia Orange and Isaac Tufvesson at the American Library Association’s Office for Literacy and Outreach Services.