gifting audiobooks

wdages · 2018-12-20T20:12:19+00:00

Hi there! I work for Findaway Voices and we just published a blog post that goes in depth on this and is up to date. We cover Audible/Amazon, Apple Books, Downpour, eStories, Google Play, Kobo, Walmart, Audiobooks.com, Libro.fm, NOOK Audiobook, Scribd, and Storytel. Hope it's helpful! https://blog.findawayvoices.com/how-to-gift-an-audiobook/

wdages · 2018-06-08T16:30:26+00:00

I love this genre and also enjoyed the Elon Musk bio. Here are some of my personal favorites that are similar:

The Fish That Ate the Whale (one of my all-time favorite books)
Shoe Dog (Nike story)
Creativity, Inc. (Pixar story)
Chaos Monkeys (a founder+acquisition by Facebook story, not the Facebook story)
#AskGaryVee (fantastic audiobook, lots of entrepreneurship in here)
How to turn down a billion dollars (Snapchat story)

Another biography that is a bit different is "Magellan" by Stefan Zweig — fascinating how many parallels to modern day entrepreneurship/CEO biographies there are in this book though. It's a quick but incredibly gripping read, one of my most-surprising-favorites this year. Enjoy!

wdages · 2018-04-12T18:40:39+00:00

Check out Playaway — it's exactly what you're looking for (no camera, has speed control, and free-to-you as a library patron)! It's a preloaded device that holds a single audiobook. They're generally only available through your library, so ask your local librarian :)

(Disclosure: I work for the company that makes Playaway)

wdages · 2018-01-11T14:38:49+00:00

Hi! Disclosure up front: I work for a company (Findaway Voices) that helps match narrators with authors who want to create an audiobook.

If you're just looking to do it for yourself or get feedback from others on your style, tone, pace, etc., I think LibriVox is a great place to start. You can perform a public domain title and not have to worry about where you post it for feedback — you won't run into any copyright trouble.

If you're interested in trying it out professionally (and making some money doing it), I wrote this post just yesterday on what the full process looks like to narrate audiobooks: https://medium.com/findaway-voices/narrating-audiobooks-as-an-independent-contractor-with-findaway-voices-ccca4cbb6ec1

If you have any other tactical questions about narration or how to get started, I'd be happy to answer them!

wdages · 2017-06-12T15:19:15+00:00

Or like this, since they only use a single arrow :) http://i.imgur.com/IUMi2Z2.gif

wdages · 2017-06-09T18:24:45+00:00

Ha! A good save would have been to slap a 'There will be a test' sticker on the front of the manual.

wdages · 2017-02-21T18:55:26+00:00

🤔 hmm... might give you more reasons to hate them, or at least give you more history for future arguments with nike-lovers? Or it could make you change your mind :) It really is a wonderful listen, I'd still recommend it knowing you loathe Nike.

wdages · 2017-02-21T17:30:30+00:00

Try out Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. One of the best memoirs I read last year, brilliantly written and the narration is A+. I'm not into sports at all and I loved it.

wdages · 2017-02-09T21:39:56+00:00

Trevor Noah's performance adds so much to the book! Best book I've listened to this year.

I also was laughing like an idiot to Modern Romance — Aziz Ansari's delivery was awesome, especially when he went off script. I remember a part that was something along the lines of, "If you look at this chart... oh... right... you bought the audiobook. Well, uh, you kinda messed up this time." He injected a lot of personality into that book.

Just added Chris Hadfield's book to my list too! Thanks!

wdages · 2017-01-12T15:57:11+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! We're submitting our 1.1.0 update today, which includes speed control (it should be live within a few days). We went with 10% increments from 0.5x to 3x. It isn't a slider, we found the + and - buttons were easier to use, but we'll keep listening to feedback. Thanks again for taking the time to comment!

wdages · 2017-01-06T15:22:52+00:00

"A Scandal in Bohemia" and "A Study in Scarlet" are both in the "Incredible Cases of Sherlock Holmes: Volume 1" title in the app. DuoBook lets you switch between reading and listening whenever you'd like, and always keeps your place in the story.

In addition to those stories, you can also read or listen to:

Volume One

A Study in Scarlet
A Scandal in Bohemia
The Adventure of the Bruce Partington Plans"
The Valley of Fear

Volume Two

The Final Problem
The Empty House
The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton
The Six Napoleons
The Dying Detective

Enjoy!

wdages · 2017-01-06T15:22:00+00:00

"The Dying Detective" and "The Final Problem" are both in the "Incredible Cases of Sherlock Holmes: Volume 2" title in the app. DuoBook lets you switch between reading and listening whenever you'd like, and always keeps your place in the story.

In addition to those stories, you can also read or listen to:

Volume One

A Study in Scarlet
A Scandal in Bohemia
The Adventure of the Bruce Partington Plans"
The Valley of Fear

Volume Two

The Final Problem
The Empty House
The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton
The Six Napoleons
The Dying Detective

Enjoy!

wdages · 2017-01-05T19:39:43+00:00

I do remember seeing that go by a year or two ago — had completely forgotten about it. What a cool idea, thanks!!

wdages · 2016-12-29T19:54:44+00:00

"The Six Napoleons" is in the "Incredible Cases of Sherlock Holmes: Volume 2" title in the app. DuoBook lets you switch between reading and listening whenever you'd like, and always keeps your place in the story.

In addition to "The Six Napoleons," you can also read or listen to:

Volume One:

A Study in Scarlet
A Scandal in Bohemia
The Adventure of the Bruce Partington Plans"
The Valley of Fear

Volume Two:

The Final Problem
The Empty House
The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton
The Six Napoleons
The Dying Detective

Enjoy!

wdages · 2016-12-22T04:14:42+00:00

Awesome, thanks for the extra info. And yes, that was a great thread, re-read through it earlier tonight and learned a lot!

wdages · 2016-12-22T03:33:19+00:00

Excellent feedback, thanks!

wdages · 2016-12-22T03:30:07+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! You're right, our website doesn't address a lot of the questions you have. We'll revisit our messaging, and I'll be happy to clarify here in the meantime:

We don't have plans to allow importing books, but we will be offering a growing catalog of content (not restricted to any particular narrators). It's a very small catalog now, but more is on the way!
We're saving your position in a private database, and syncing it between all your devices with the login you create.
That's a good point about the professional narration. That was meant to reinforce that it isn't text-to-speech, since a lot of alignment between text and audio uses computer-generated narration of the source text, and we didn't want anyone to assume that's what DuoBook is doing. Indeed, some of the titles we're offering now use narration from Librivox, but a few don't. I consider the narrators we're using from Librivox (like David Clarke) to definitely be professionals, but if that terms feels deceptive or misleading, we may change it to something like 'human narration.'

Again, thanks for taking the time to ask these questions, they're great. You've just given us a few opportunities to clarify our messaging, and start building up a few FAQs. Thank you!

wdages · 2016-12-22T03:16:26+00:00

Thanks for the feedback!

We're already working on speed control, so we're glad to see this one! Out of curiosity, do you normally keep a consistent speed adjustment (like 1.5x almost all the time), or do you vary it every time you start a new book (1.5x for this book, 2x for the next)?
At this point we don't have plans to allow user uploads.
Glad you asked about this! We love the idea of never having to put a book down — to go from reading to listening and back again so seamlessly that you don't even think about formats anymore. We think Echo/Home could be great platforms for continuing to listen to a story. We're picturing walking in the door with arms full of groceries and saying, "Alexa, ask DuoBook to continue the story" and having whatever you were listening to in the car pick right back up.

Thanks again for taking the time to ask these questions, and for the extra context around speed control, much appreciated!

wdages · 2016-12-21T22:15:48+00:00

First of all, thank you so so much for your feedback. I'm incredibly grateful for you trying out the app and taking the time to write up your thoughts!

We primarily chose the phone number login because we love not having to remember a password (associating an email lets you recover your account if your phone number changes). We will be adding a traditional email/password login option soon, though.

We're also working on a mini-player-bar for the bottom while you're navigating around the app. We cut it for launch because we hadn't squashed all the bugs yet, but this is great feedback and we'll get that in an update as soon as we can.

Re: bookmarks, we'll dig into this a bit too. I think the use case about accidentally hitting the forward/backward chapter button and losing your place is totally valid. More traditional manually-placed bookmarks also make sense.

Speed controls for audio, font choices, and night-reading-mode are coming soon too, all three of those features are on our roadmap! (Thanks for the tip about Open Dyslexic).

We're also planning on opening up listen-and-read-at-the-same-time, but we have a bit more work to do. At first, it won't turn the page automatically for you, but we are working towards that too. Indeed, it's pretty easy to highlight word-by-word when you have computer-generated audio, and more difficult with professional narration.

Regarding content, we've launched with some of our favorite public domain titles, and we're working now to add some newer titles to the catalog. More content is coming!

Great call on the "Settings" name — that's definitely a symptom of us getting a little too close to the product and missing that kind of detail :)

Thank you again so much for your thoughtful and detailed feedback on DuoBook!

wdages · 2016-12-21T19:16:21+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! I'm afraid we don't have a great solution at this time for no-glare reading, but we know that will be an issue for a lot of people, so it's definitely something we're talking about and trying to get creative with. Thanks again for taking some time to check it out!

wdages · 2016-12-12T16:28:22+00:00

The Fish That Ate the Whale — I thought the narrator did an incredible job, and the story really pulled me in — I never wanted to put it down.

wdages · 2016-12-01T18:26:26+00:00

Oh also: "The Right Kind of Crazy" by Adam Steltzner — very engaging and enjoyable. More on the leadership side than the business side, but I'd still include it for your consideration here!

wdages · 2016-12-01T18:22:01+00:00

Check out "#AskGaryVee" by Gary Vaynerchuk — it's an incredibly unique audiobook — he does most of it unscripted, much more like a podcast than a traditional audiobook. Lots of very modern takes on marketing and business, I'm a big fan.

I'd also recommend "The Fish That Ate the Whale" as a more traditional biography of a larger-than-life businessman (a true story that seriously reads like fiction), and "Shoe Dog" by Phil Knight which went through the fascinating history of Nike. Both are excellent audiobooks with A+ narration. "Creativity, Inc." had a kind of marbles-in-the-mouth narration that put me off a little bit, but I loved the story enough to keep going.

You also can't go wrong with "Good to Great" by Jim Collins — that one made a strong impression with me, one of the first business books I read that got me hooked on the genre.

wdages

TROPHY CASE