Just Press Play

2009 Award-winner from Down Under

Jellicoe Road, the 2009 Printz Award winner, launches on Playaway April 1st. 

The Michael J. Printz Award honors excellence in Young Adult literature.  Only one title per year is chosen for the top award. 

Hailed for the authenticity of her characters, Australian author Melina Marchetta weaves a complex dual narrative that tells the story of a teenage girl trying to fit together the pieces of her own mysterious past.

The audio version comes to us from Bolinda Audio, an Australian  publisher that's been getting rave reviews for the quality of its productions and its catalog of Aussie writers who are gaining recognition and developing substantial followings around the English-speaking world.

Throughout the rest of 2009, look for a fresh crop of 20 or more Bolinda titles per month on Playaway, including offerings from Kate Morton, Tim Winton, and Matthew Reilly.  

And see my earlier post for more 2009 award-winners available on Playaway.  

Playaway Sights and Sounds

Playaway co-fouder and chief strategy officer, Blake Squires, was recently interviewed by Sarah Long, Director of the North Suburban Library System, a consortial group made up of 650 academic, public, school, and special libraries in the north and northwest suburbs of Chicago.  Sarah's lengthy credentials include past service as president of both ALA and PLA, and she now maintains a lively multimedia website for North Surburban called Library Beat.  Their full conversation is available as a downloadable podcast at:
        http://www.librarybeat.org/longshots/play/149

And here's Blake leading a recent tour of Playaway headquarters in Solon, OH:
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgbLsj_sbTM

Donna Pittman of TV station KMBC in Kansas City, MO recently filed a story on the popularity of Playaway at the Kansas City (Kansas) Public Library.  We were particularly pleased to see her mention that, if you're lucky enough to have a car stereo with an auxiliary input jack, you can plug in a Playaway and listen over your car's speakers.  You can watch the segment at:
        http://www.kmbc.com/video/18896127/index.html

Kindle 2.0 -- too Blount a point?

Just returned from a trip to Brilliance Audio in Grand Haven, Michigan, where I had the chance to play for a few minutes with Amazon's new Kindle 2.0.   (Amazon acquired Brilliance in May of 2007.)

The new Kindle has a sleeker design that's thinner and lighter than the original Kindle but also feels more solid.  It has longer battery life, smoother controls, and an improved display.  It really looks like a product that has come in to its own. 

Also new to Kindle 2.0 is a somewhat controversial text-to-speech capability, employing technology from Nuance Communications, Inc.  Originally intended to  work with any text loaded onto the Kindle, the announcement of the feature briefly caused a huge stir in the world of publishing, when author Roy Blount, Jr., speaking as president of the Authors Guild, asserted in a New York Times Op-Ed, that Kindle's text-to-speech functionality constituted an unauthorized taking of audio rights for the written work. 

“Kindle text-to-speech will
help the audiobook industry
more than it will hurt it...”

Blount is wonderfully witty, a skillful raconteur, a lover of language, and an irrascible defender of "what is right."  In taking his position, he's doing what he must do as president of the Guild.  

He's correct to point out that, "income from audio books helps not inconsiderably to keep authors, and publishers, afloat."  But, in my opinion, he overstates the case when he asserts that authors must be compensated for the additional value "that audio adds to Kindle 2’s version of books."

The question is:  how much value is that, really?  Kindle's designers seem to have intended the feature as a bit of a "gee-whiz" type of option.  The idea is that it might afford busy, multi-tasking readers the opportunity to continue to take in information even at times when they have to take their eyes off the page -- while driving for example. 

It's doubtful that one would want to listen in this manner for very long, but it's easy enough to imagine certain types of texts where the approach could be useful.  Certainly people who use Kindle to read research reports and other professionally required non-fiction material could benefit, as could visually and physically impaired users (although the National Federation for the Blind has expressed concern about the accessbility of Kindle's visually based controls).  The popularity of Kindle 2.0 in general and its text-to-speech feature in particular remain to be seen.

My own opinion is closer to that of Times technology writer David Pogue who -- the day before Blount's piece was published -- wrote a glowing review of Kindle 2.0 but noted:

But if you have visions dancing in your head of turning every book into an audiobook, forget it. The Kindle’s male and female voices are very good, but nobody will mistake them for the voices of humans, let alone the professionals who record audiobooks. Kindle voices have some peculiar inflections and pronunciations — they sound oddly Norwegian, sometimes — and, of course, they’re incapable of expressing emotion. They read Hemingway the same way they read Stephen Colbert.

At Brilliance, we listened to a sample read-aloud by Kindle -- The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (available on Playaway in English and Spanish). 

Like many reviewers, my immediate reaction was that the overall voice quality does sound quite good.  But after a few sentences, I noticed that the delivery is about what anyone with a GPS unit might expect it to be -- robotic, free of interpretation, and -- despite the corporate name -- lacking in nuance.  Words sometimes run together in an odd way, and the "Norwegian" sound that Pogue refers to is the singsong rhythm that sometimes results from evenly stressing words of varying syllabic length.

The general opinion of the people in the room was that Kindle text-to-speech will help the audiobook industry more than it will hurt it by expanding interest in and demand for spoken-word content.  The bar may be set a little higher for human-read narrations -- if a commercial audiobook production doesn't sound appreciably better than a robo-read, then why buy it? -- but if the result is better-sounding human-read audiobooks, then audiobook listeners and the industry in general can both benefit. 

In the end, the possibility of legal action by the Author's Guild was real enough that Amazon announced it will provide a mechanism for rights holders to opt out of text-to-speech on a title-by-title basis.  They are positioning this as a "disabling" of the feature by rights holders. Currently there are some 225,000 titles available on Kindle.  Only time will tell how many remain text-to-speech enabled and on what terms. 

What do you think?  Leave your comment below.

There are currently 240 Brilliance titles on Playaway, with dozens more added every month.

And by the way, Roy Blount's 2007 memoir, Long Time Leaving, from HighBridge audio, narrated by the author, is available on Playaway - click here for details.

Simultaneous -- and Almost-Simultaneous -- Releases

Libraries like to have new titles on the shelf the same day they go on sale at Amazon or the the local bookstore.  Some libraries even allow patrons to put a hold on a title before it's available.  Patrons have come to expect this. 

And these days -- as the number of available formats explodes -- folks expect the same for large print, ebooks, audio CD, audio download -- and now, Playaway.

Launching a simultaneous release across all formats is no easy task.  When you think about it, an audio publisher can't create an audio production until they have the script, and often a final manuscript doesn't arrive until very close to a title's print on-sale date.  It's not unheard of for the audio producer to get the script with as little as 2 or 3 weeks of lead time.  

“Look for the number
of simultaneous releases
on Playaway to grow steadily...”

When Playaway licenses a title for our pre-loaded, all-in-one format the schedule is even tighter because we have to wait for that audio producer to finish the recording and transmit it to us.  We then re-encode the audio, adapt the artwork, print the labels, and load the content.  For a simultaneous release, we might have to do that all within just a few days -- no mean feat given that we're currently launching over 500 titles every month!

But we understand the importance of simultaneous releases to libraries and their patrons.  So we're declaring 2009 The Year of Living Simultaneously -- making our biggest effort ever to bring you lots of hot new releases available at the same time as every other format. 

Look for the number of simultaneous releases on Playaway to grow steadily over the course of the year.  Here's a sampling for March:

The 39 Clues - Book Three:  The Sword Thief
by Peter Lerangis
(Scholastic Audio - Children's Fiction)
March 3, 2009

The 3rd title in the planned 10-part mystery-adventure series from Scholastic.  Rick Riordan (of Percy Jackson fame) has scripted the story arc for the full series, and each new installment is written by a a different high-profile author. 

The author of The Sword Thief is Peter Lerangis, known for the Spy X mystery series, the Watchers sci-fi series, and the Drama Club teen romance series as well as for the critically acclaimed work of historical fiction Smiler's Bones, and the two-book polar adventure, Antarctica, which was selected as required reading by the JASON organization in 2001.

Goosebumps Horrorland Book 8:
Say Cheese and Die Screaming!
by R.L. Stine
(Scholastic Audio - Children's Fiction)
March 1, 2009 

The latest offering from the prolific author who's been called "the kiddie Steven King."  Although I was partial to the title of Book 2 in this series (Monster Blood for Breakfast!), this one is my new favorite. 

Barnaby Grimes: Curse of the Night Wolf
by Chris Riddell and Paul Stewart
(Brilliance Audio - Children's Fiction)
March 20, 2009 - simultaneous with other audio formats

Curse of the Night Wolf was published in print in September 2008.  The first audiobook edition launches March 20th and will be released simultaneously on all audio formats -- Playaway included.

First in the new series about young Barnaby Grimes, "tic-tock lad" -- a fast-moving messenger boy in a fictional city a lot like London at an indeterminate time a lot like the late 1800's.  Barnaby specializes in "Highstacking" -- taking the most direct root to his destination by means of the rooftops. 

His high-speed adventures carry him into the realm of the supernatural, and his rooftop antics evoke the newly popular extreme sport (or art or physical discipline or something) of "parkour".  Parkour was given some big-time big-screen exposure a couple of years ago in the opening chase scene of the Jame Bond film Casino Royale.  I just saw Slum Dog Millionaire this weekend, and the first chase scene of the movie was a bit like parkour for the under-ten set. Here are a few good articles from the New York Times:

New Way for Teenagers To See if They Bounce (March 28, 2004)
Throwing Yourself Against the Wall (June 29, 2007)
Climbing Walls Because They're There (October 11, 2008)

Mortal Instruments -- Book Three:  City of Glass
by Cassandra Clare
(Simon & Schuster Audio - YA Fiction)
March 24, 2009

The much-anticipated third installment of the Mortal Instruments trilogy.  As good and evil face off,  teenage heroine Clary must face her father.



Etta
by Gerald Kolpan 
(Blackstone Audio - Adult Fiction)
March 24, 2009

This debut novel (published in print by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House) is the fictionalized story of the real-life Etta Place, outlaw companion of William Longabaugh aka the Sundance Kid.  Author Gerald Kolpan is an Emmy Award winning Philadelphia television reporter.  For more about Etta Place, check out his entertaining and informative website at:  http://geraldkolpan.com/.

Strategic Acceleration: Succeed at the Speed of Life
by Tony Jeary 
(Brilliance Audio - Adult Non-Fiction: Business)
March 3, 2009

Renowned CEO coach Tony Jeary lays out the principles of his powerful leadership methodology combining awareness, operational practices, and powerful informational resources designed to produce superior results within time frames that exceed traditional expectations.  Strategic Acceleration is also a leadership mindset that approaches old issues in new ways.

Hardcover published by Vanguard Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group.

One Day at a Time
by Danielle Steel 
(Brilliance Audio)
Adult Fiction
March 1, 2009

Put this in the category of "near-simultaneous". 
Danielle Steel's latest was launched February 24th in print and on CD.  The Playaway edition is available as of  March 1. 

Promises in Death
by J.D. Robb 
(Brilliance Audio - Adult Fiction)
March 1, 2009

The latest page-tuner from J.D. Robb, aka You-Know-Who.  This is number 28 or number 34 -- depending on who you ask -- in the super popular, futuristic Eve Dallas detective series.  Print and CD launched Feb 19.  Get it on Playaway, starting March 1.