News – Page 57 – SFFaudio

Blackstone Audiobooks Overtstock Sale

SFFaudio News

Blackstone Audiobooks Overstock Sale SFFaudio receives FREE audio media in the mail on a regular basis. They generally arrive unsolicited (though sometimes not) and we take it that their arrival equates with a tacit understanding that we’ll either mention the receipt on the website and/or review the audiobook or audio drama. That’s the extent of our formal relationship with any publisher or retailer. We do not use affiliate links to Amazon, or any other audiobook retailer. This lack of affiliation means that we can never feel pressured into reviewing an audiobook or audio drama more positively (or negatively) than we might otherwise.

Now, with all that said, I think I can speak for most of the folks who work at SFFaudio and say that we are all especially fond of Blackstone Audiobooks.

There are a few reasons for this BA love. Blackstone picks great books to turn into audiobooks, pairing them with terrific narrators, and then releases them in DRM free version. That’s really all what you want from a publisher. But that isn’t the end of it. Every so often they blow-out audiobooks that are cramming their wharehouse space. And that’s why right now they’re offering 237 different audiobooks for just $9.99 each.

That’s a STUNNING DEAL my friends!

And, if you buy two audiobooks (or more) you’ll even get FREE SHIPPING (within the USA). Here are just a few of the many titles they’ve got for sale right now:

THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; read by Ben Kingsley
THE AENEID by Virgil; read by Frederick Davidson
ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND by Lewis Carroll; read by Michael York
THE CALL OF THE WILD by Jack London; read by Ethan Hawke
A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT by Mark Twain; read by Carl Reiner
FRANKENSTEIN, OR THE MODERN PROMETHEUS by Mary Shelley; read by Simon Templeman, Anthony Heald, and Stefan Rudnicki
I AM LEGEND by Richard Matheson; read by Robertson Dean |READ OUR REVIEW|
IT’S SUPERMAN! by Tom De Haven; read by Scott Brick
KING KONG by Edgar Wallace and Merian C. Cooper; novelization by Delos W. Lovelace; read by Stefan Rudnicki |READ OUR REVIEW|
THE MARTIAN CHILD by David Gerrold; read by Scott Brick
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY by Oscar Wilde; read by Simon Vance
THE PRESTIGE by Christopher Priest; read by Simon Vance
THE PRINCE by Niccoló Machiavelli; read by Patrick Cullen
ROCKET SHIP GALILEO by Robert A Heinlein; read by Spider Robinson |READ OUR REVIEW|
THE SPARTANS by Paul Cartledge; read by John Lee
SWEENEY TODD AND THE STRING OF PEARLS by Yuri Rasovsky; Performed by a full cast
TALES OF BEATRIX POTTER by Beatrix Potter; read by Nadia May
TARZAN OF THE APES by Edgar Rice Burroughs; read by Ben Kingsley
THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE by David Hajdu; read by Stefan Rudnicki
THERMOPYLAE by Paul Cartledge; read by John Lee
THE TIME MACHINE by H.G. Wells; read by Ben Kingsley
THE TRIAL by Franz Kafka; read by Geoffrey Howard
UTOPIA by Sir Thomas More; read by James Adams
V FOR VENDETTA by Steve Moore; read by Simon Vance |READ OUR REVIEW|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS by H. G. Wells; read by Christopher Hurt
WE WISH TO INFORM YOU THAT TOMORROW WE WILL BE KILLED WITH OUR FAMILIES by Philip Gourevitch; read by Jeff Cummings
WHERE’S MY JETPACK? by Daniel H. Wilson; read by Stefan Rudnicki |READ OUR REVIEW|
THE WINTER OF FRANKIE MACHINE by Don Winslow; read by Dennis Boutsikaris
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO NARNIA by Jonathan Rogers; read by Brian Emerson

Posted by Jesse Willis

StarShipSofa Goes Dickens for the Robinsons!

SFFaudio News

The British podcast StarShipSofa is rallying the science fiction/fantasy community around Spider and Jeanne Robinson this Holiday Season with a special book offer.

The online audio magazine has released an original three-episode novella by multiple Bram Stoker Award nominee Lawrence Santoro. StarShipSofa visitors and subscribers alike can hear Santoro reading “Lord Dickens’ Declaration” for free. They may also elect to purchase an ebook of the 23,000 word novella with art by American illustrator Skeet Scienski.

All proceeds from the sale of the book will go to the Robinsons to support them during Jeanne’s battle with cancer.

Diagnosed with a rare biliary cancer, the treatments have eaten away at the Robinson’s finances as doctors aggressively fight the to keep the disease from spreading.

Santoro suspended work on another writing project to write and record “Lord Dickens…”. “Over the years, Spider and Jeanne’s work has been a constant on my home shelf and in my memory,” he said. “Giving them a couple months work is small payback. Keep dancing, Jeanne!”

This “Lord Dickens…” ebook will be available for purchase only through December 31st. Priced at 2.99 GBP (about $5 US), the purchaser has an option to donate more in increments of 10, 20, 50, & 100 Pounds.

Said, StarShipSofa editor Tony C. Smith, “Any fan of the Robinson’s can attest to their strength, but we hope that through this time of strife, the science fiction and fantasy community can help them survive through the worst. Thank you for standing with them in their time of need.”

Posted by Tony C. Smith

Tor.com Story Podcast 001

SFFaudio News

Tor.com has started a new fiction podcast! Produced by Mur Lafferty, the first episode went up today – “After the Coup” by John Scalzi. Details from Tor.com:

For over a year, Tor.com has brought you excellent short fiction on our site, but now we’re making the audio of these stories available to you in podcast form. We’ll be bringing you both new fiction and our archived stories, so don’t worry if you’ve missed anything archived on the site. The podcast will also include mention of the recent topics on the Tor.com blog, convention reports, and interviews from time to time. We hope you enjoy it and we welcome your comments.

Click here for more details and subscription links.

Posted by Scott D. Danielson

Cory Doctorow on audiobooks

SFFaudio News

Cory Doctorow is writing columns for Publishers Weekly. In this month’s column Doctorow discusses his love of audiobooks and the difficuties he’s encountered in getting them into his fan’s ears. I’m going to quote several paragraphs of this excellent essay, you can check out the full article |HERE|.

I just flat-out love audiobooks. There’s nothing like a story being read aloud to you as you go for a long walk or go for a drive. For years, I’ve been reading my short stories, articles, and even a couple of my novels for my podcast, which has thousands of weekly listeners. So I was delighted when my agent sold audio rights to my fourth novel, Little Brother, to Random House Audio. RHA does great books, and the actor they tapped for the reading, Kirby Heyborne, did a superb job.

Unfortunately, distribution hasn’t gone smoothly. RHA didn’t want to do physical CDs—understandable, perhaps, as time was too short. Besides, CD sales are in free-fall while digital delivery using Audible is skyrocketing. Why sell antiquated CDs to an audience that mostly wants to play them on portable MP3 players?

I’m great with that in theory, but in practice it’s more complicated. I used to be a huge Audible customer. When I switched operating systems, however, I discovered that Audible’s DRM wouldn’t work on my Linux computer. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on my Audible collection, so I set out to convert it all to MP3. That required playing each book in real-time through the computer’s sound card, recapturing it with the AudioHijack program, and then saving it as an MP3. It took a solid month of running three old Macs 24/7 to get all of my audiobooks out of Audible’s proprietary wrapper and into the universal MP3 format so that I could take my investment with me to a new digital home.

Of course, I probably could have “pirated” the same audiobooks more quickly—after all, it’s not hard to find cracked Audible titles on the Internet. This is why I can’t understand why publishers or writers opt for DRM. It clearly doesn’t stop real pirates from copying, and it locks good customers into the DRM vendor’s ecosystem. I wouldn’t sell my books through a bookseller who demanded readers only enjoy them on a chair from Wal-Mart; why would I sell my audiobooks on terms that insist my listeners only use devices approved by a DRM vendor?

So, RHA and I went to Audible and politely asked them to sell Little Brother without DRM. They turned us down flat. And because Audible is the only retailer who can sell on iTunes, that closed the door on the largest distribution channel in the world for audiobooks.

For my next book, Makers, we tried again. This time Audible agreed to carry the title without DRM. Hooray! Except now there was a new problem: Apple refused to allow DRM-free audiobooks in the Apple Store—yes, the same Apple that claims to hate DRM. Okay, we thought, we’ll just sell direct through Audible, at least it’s a relatively painless download process, right? Not quite. It turns out that buying an audiobook from Audible requires a long end-user license agreement (EULA) that bars users from moving their Audible books to any unauthorized device or converting them to other formats. Instead of DRM, they accomplish the lock-in with a contract. |READ THE REST HERE|

Posted by Jesse Willis

SpeakingVolumes: Roger Zelazny read by Roger Zelazny

SFFaudio News

Neill Smith sez:

“…two Roger Zelazny audiobooks … have become available in unabridged form on CDs – Nine Princes In Amber and A Night In Lonesome October as originally read by Roger. You may know about these (and future Zelazny unabridged titles to finally be rereleased) but I just happened on the news. If you don’t know, the company is Speaking Volumes. I got the news from the newsgroup alt.books.roger-zelazny on Google. According to Chris Kovacs on this group, the releases will include Roger’s readings of Blood of Amber and Knight of Shadows which were not released in unabridged form on cassettes.”

It looks like Speaking Volumes will have quite a number of Roger Zelazny audiobooks published! But this new publisher doesn’t only have Zelazny, Speaking Volumes is doing some other titles that look very cool:

Medicine Cup / Microbe by Bill Clem (two medical thrillers paired as double novel along the lines of the old Ace and Tor doubles)

Three novels by Max Allan Collins novels

We’re going to try to get some of these in as review copies too.

[Thanks Neill!]

Posted by Jesse Willis

Audible.com: New Customers get a free audiobook w/ no cc required

SFFaudio News

Audible.com is offering a selected free audiobook to any new customer without the usual requirement that you enter a credit card number. I think that is a first for Audible.com!