War of the Worlds gets interactive free audio books treatment

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The landscape-oriented free audio books app presents the full text of Wells’ chilling novel, with side-by-side pages that, to me, seem more book-like than if the words stretched from one side of the screen to the other.

Of course, the highlight here is not the presentation of the text, but rather the 27 illustrated, animated, interactive pages interspersed throughout the book. The artwork is dazzling–and occasionally a bit gruesome, as when you unleash the Martian tripod’s heat-ray on a field of onlookers (who literally burst into flame). The accompanying screams of horror make the experience that much more intense.  PCSpeed.net

Do audio books Cost More Than Amazon Hardcovers

Readers of e-books and listeners of free audio books may not be able to turn paper pages, lend their copies to friends or file them away on living room bookshelves. But they do have the comfort of knowing that they paid less for them than for hardcovers.

The e-book price for Ken Follett’s new novel exceeds that of the hardcover version.James Patterson fans face that, too, prompting Kindle customers to lodge complaints.

Unless they bought “Fall of Giants” by Ken Follett, which was published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Group USA, last week. On Amazon.com, the price for the e-book was $19.99; the hardcover edition was $19.39. PCSpeed.net

Is The Free Audio books Publishing Becoming Obsolete?

The Magazine Publishers of America was established in 1919 and is the leading industry association for free audio books and magazine publishers. However, it’s just announced a curious name change. It will still be known by the acronym MPA, but is officially dropping two of the words from that acronym: “publishers” and “America.” Henceforth, the trade group will be known (rather illogically) as “MPA – The Association of Magazine Media.” The reason? “Magazine media content engages consumers globally across multiple platforms, including websites, tablets, smartphones, books, live events and more.”  PCSpeed.net

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Audiobooks activity fading among social network users

According to a recent study from US firm Forrester Research, free audioboks  generation activity by U.S and EU users across social networking sites has declined even as such sites have seen ever-greater levels of participation and general use.

Writing on the Forrester’s Blog, Jackie Rousseau-Anderson of the company, the growth seen in social network audiences and userbases has not been matched by a growth in those who use them for content generation – what Forrester terms “creators”. These are the users who upload their own audio or video media, who publish their own blogs or web pages, or who post their own written articles or stories online. PCSpeed.net

Organize Your free audio books Library With Free Manager Calibre

You’ve finally bought that Kindle or Nook or Kobo that you’ve been dreaming about, and in a frenzy of future anticipation, you’ve purchased dozens of e-book bestsellers. Then, delighting in libraries offering more than 1.5 million free, public domain works–as well as thousands of magazines and newspapers–you’ve loaded your e-reader with the literary goodies you have always meant to read. At the end of the day, your e-reader now holds scores or even hundreds of e-books.  PCSpeed.net

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Amazon Launches audiobooks For The Web

The new service introduced in beta Tuesday is called Kindle for the Web and allows people to sample  audiobooks through a browser without having to install the Kindle software. Amazon makes the latter available for a variety of devices, including Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch; and smartphones based on Google’s Android operating system.Info Week

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Children like appeal of free audiobooks

The report set out to explore the attitudes and behaviors of parents and children toward reading books for fun in a digital age. Scholastic surveyed more than 2,000 children ages 6 to 17, and their parents, in the spring.

Parents and educators have long worried that digital diversions like video games and cellphones cut into time that children spend reading. However, they see the potential for using technology to their advantage, introducing books to digitally savvy children through e-readers, computers and mobile devices.  PCSpeed.net

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Start a Digital AudioBooks Club on Your BlackBerry

Who says that audiobooks  is for antisocial people? Yesterday, Borders’s global e-reading service Kobo took the stage at BlackBerry DEVCON to demo its new social reading application for the BlackBerry Messenger SDK, which will allow users to do everything from chat with friends while shopping for books to discuss passages in real time.  Mashable

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Publisher signs contract to provide free audio books to Apple iBookstore

Ebook sales, while a small percentage of current total free audios book sales, is a market that is developing rapidly and presents strong opportunity for self published authors. Formatting books for consumption on digital devices can be very challenging – Dog Ear Publishing offers the tools needed to deliver content seamlessly to digital consumers.  PCSpeed.net

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Anger as a Private Company Takes Over free audio books libraries

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Can a municipal service like a library hold so central a place that it should be entrusted to a profit-driven contractor only as a last resort — and maybe not even then?

“There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization.”  PCSpeed.net

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