Naxos Audiobooks is giving away a free story from Classic Ghost Stories each week until Halloween! Grab this week’s offering, Charles Dickens’ The Signal Man read by Stephen Critchlow, here.

Booklist’s Quick Tips for Schools and Libraries – a new & improved monthly e-newsletter – debuts today with great ideas for teachers, librarians, parents, and caregivers. Sign up for your FREE connection to reviews of the newest & best in children’s and YA literature, as well as exclusive content such this month’s columns on mystery read-alouds and children’s books about unemployment and job loss.

Audiobooks: That All May Learn is the title of my article in this month’s Quick Tips about audio formats for special-needs students, with links to resources that provide FREE audiobooks and NO COST audio versions of ANY textbook or novel assigned to students with disabilities that limit print use. Feel free to print out the column, forward to your special education staff, email to colleagues, or post in your parent newsletter. Add the resources from these organizations to your educational toolkit and increase your students’ access to audiobooks at no charge!

Joe Hill, Stephen King, Richard Matheson, Neil Gaiman, Marcia Talley, and Edward P. Jones are the featured authors in HarperAudio’s “Summer of Books” promotion. Click here to download the audio MP3 files for your Labor Day weekend drive or final lazy days on the beach. Or grab Gaiman’s A Study in Emerald, his Hugo and Nebula Award-winning story from Fragile Things, to use in the classroom during your science fiction study!

And while you’re on the site, check out some of the cool videos – like this awesome Emily the Strange:The Lost Days book trailer:

Harlequin’s new Teen Romance line kicks off with Rachel Vincent’s paranormal prequel to her Soul Screamers series. Grab the audiobook of My Soul to Lose for free from Audible here: http://bit.ly/EEIkZ. Act fast as I have no idea how long this offer will apply. I am curious about this move into YA for Harlequin, after the success of their African-American YA Kimani Tru imprint. I just finished my Voices in My Head audiobook column for Booklist on Romance, and have a new-found fondness for the genre! You can also get My Soul to Lose as a free eBook from the Harlequin website. Here’s more about My Soul to Lose to help you decide if you want to download the 1 hour 48 minute title:

She doesn’t see dead people, but…
She senses when someone near her is about to die. And when that happens, a force beyond her control compels her to scream bloody murder. Literally.
Kaylee just wants to enjoy having caught the attention of the hottest guy in school. But a normal date is hard to come by when Nash seems to know more about her need to scream than she does. And when classmates start dropping dead for no apparent reason, only Kaylee knows who’ll be next…

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/

Wendy’s & Listening Library team up to provide an awesome freebie to hook kids on summertime reading with their ears – and for teachers & parents to build an audiobook collection. Make that car trip easier with an audiobook & activity sheets printed out from the Magic Tree House Classroom Club. There’s even a 25% off & free shipping  deal on ANY audiobook on the Listening Library website! Here’s more info from Random House Audio:

Wendy’s Restaurant Audiobook Promotion

Wendy’s & Listening Library along with Magic Tree House® team up to spread the word about audiobooks. The promotion is underway and runs through August 9, 2009.

Every Wendy’s Kid’s Meal will contain a free exclusive Magic Tree House/Listening Library CD. The CD will include one full Magic Tree House story plus one song from Magic Tree House: The Musical.

Wendy’s will support the 5-week campaign with in-store signage reinforcing the message that audiobooks are a great family entertainment choice and directing consumers to bookstores and libraries for additional audio titles.

Public libraries using OverDrive as their download service for audiobooks, eBooks, music, and video just expanded their offerings – and made quite a few patrons much happier. In the past, iPod users were frustrated with the Windows-MP3 device-only compatibility with OverDrive’s file format. But the release of OverDrive’s no-cost Media Console version 3.2 for Windows or version 1.0 for Mac solves many of those issues. If you are wondering if your library offers OverDrive Media, use the OverDrive Digital Media Locator at http://search.overdrive.com I just downloaded the Audie award-winning autobiography The Measure of a Man super-quick and easy to my iPod through my public library’s website. Check out the offerings from your library – and download or take advantage of the “hold” feature to reserve titles for summertime listening!

Here’s more from the OverDrive website:

With OverDrive Media Console v3.2, the vast majority of OverDrive WMA Audiobooks can be transferred to the iPod® and the iPhone™! To ensure quality sound while minimizing file transfer times, Transfer Wizard will prompt you to adjust your iTunes® settings (if desired) before you begin a transfer. If you do adjust your settings, once the transfer is complete, Transfer Wizard displays a recap of your original settings as well as detailed steps on restoring iTunes to its original settings. Additionally, if you’re a fan of iTunes and enjoy OverDrive MP3 Audiobooks, you can now specify iTunes and/or your portable device as a destination in the course of completing a file transfer. Finally, OMC v3.2 offers enhanced support for the iPod shuffle® — with iTunes v8.1 (or newer) installed, you can now use Transfer Wizard to send OverDrive content to most iPod shuffles.

One for each member of the family: Louis L’Amour for mom or dad, Percy Jackson for the tween, and Magic Treehouse for the little one. Just sign up for the Random House Audio email newsletter, and you’ll get a download link in your email. The promo highlights the Listen Up Florida with Audiobooks program, but anyone can grab the freebies. Just in time for vacation car trips!