Audio Books Are Hot!

Vic — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 03:43:53 +0000

What do you think, are audio books hot or not?

Well it appears that Amazon the world's largest online retailer thinks they are. They just bought Audible.com the world's leading online retailer of digital audio books for an estimated $300 million.

Based in Newark, New Jersey Audible.com was established in 1995 and has grown it's inventory to well over 80,000 audio titles since that time. A considerable number of Audibles sales are through one of two subscription programs they developed and it will be interesting to see if Amazon will continue to offer these programs.

At this point in time it's unknown how Amazon will integrate Audibles audio book downloads into their own inventory of digital products. There are many more questions than answers right now, but one thing is for sure and that is with Amazon making a large investment in the world of downloadable audio books there popularity will only increase and many more people will be jumping on this trend in the near future.

We'll be following this story as it unfolds and will be updating you on what's happening as new information becomes available.

You can find out more about Audible.com at Wikipedia

Be sure and tell us what you think about this in the comments below.

Simon Vance – Audio Book Narrator

Vic — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 00:27:54 +0000

Simon Vance was born in Brighton, England in the mid fifties. In 1983 he joined BBC Radio Four as a newsreader and announcer. During this time is when he started narrating audio books for the RNIB’s Talking Book service and is where he learned his ‘trade’ that has served him so well since.In the mid nineties he moved to California and started working for Blackstone Audiobooks. In the past Simon has also narrated as Richard Matthews, Robert Whitfield and John Richmond and has more than 300 ‘books’ to his credit in the USA. During this time he has received many awards including six ‘Earphones’ awards from AudioFile magazine and six ‘Audie’ nominations. Simon is married and has two sons from a previous marriage. He also does voice over and commercial work as well as acting on stage and screen.Simon takes great pride in researching his books before narrating them so as to be familiar with all names and places. This is important as it is possible to give a character a local accent only to find halfway through the story that the character is from the other side of the country.
Simon now narrates only under his real name and is past the days when different publishers insisted that he use a different pseudonym for their publications. In fact Blackstones, the audio book publishers, are republishing his recordings of the James Bond books but using his real name this time round. As Simon is now so busy with his narrating work and is narrating for Audio Renaissance, Hachette Audio, Scholastic, The Listening Library, BBC Audiobooks America and others he has pretty much given up stage work for the time being. He has also cut back on the editing and proofing side of his work which takes up time which can better be spent on narration.

Last year he won an ‘Audie’ in the Science Fiction category for his narration of Market Forces for Trantor Media and has two ‘Audie’ nominations already this year for The Prestige (the book on which the film was based) and The Warden by Anthony Trollope.

You'll find a good selection of audio books narrated by Robert, Simon or John in our Audio Book Store.

Downloadable Audio » Downloadable audio content

Audio Books Are Hot!

Simon Vance – Audio Book Narrator