November 30, 2007

100 Best New Audio Books for Christmas

Looking for some great holiday gifts? At LearnOutLoud.com we’ve assembled a list of the 100 best new audio book releases.

All the audio books here are available on Audio CD and are in stock and ready to ship from LearnOutLoud.com. No matter who you’re giving gifts to this year, you’re sure to find an audio book they’ll enjoy and learn from.

To make it easy, we’ve divided this list of 100 new releases into categories:

Arts & Entertainment:
I Am America (and So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert
Our Dumb World by The Onion
Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself by Alan Alda
Dave Barry’s History of the Millennium (So Far) by Dave Barry

Biography:
Clapton: The Autobiography by Eric Clapton
Mosaic: Pieces of My Life So Far by Amy Grant
Listening Is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the Storycorps Project

This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women
My Grandfather’s Son by Clarence Thomas
Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw
Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson
A Mighty Heart by Mariane Pearl
Crashing Through by Robert Kurson
Amazing Grace by Eric Metaxes
Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson
Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl by Steven Bach

Business:
All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein
Free to Choose by Milton Friedman & Rose Friedman
Supercapitalism by Robert Reich
The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan
Leadership: Great Leaders, Great Teams, Great Results by Stephen R. Covey
The Power of Outrageous Marketing by Joe Vitale
Rich Dad’s Advisors: Box Set
Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life by Donald Trump
The Last Chance Millionaire by Doug Andrew
The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferris
The Tipping Point (Unabridged) by Malcolm Gladwell

History:
American Creation by Joseph J. Ellis
Boom!: Voices of the Sixties by Tom Brokaw
Conscience for Change by Martin Luther King, Jr.
The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945 by Ken Burns & Geoffrey C. Ward
The Coldest Winter: American and the Korean War by David Halberstam

Literature:
Beowulf
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol
A Family Christmas by Caroline Kennedy
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
Essential Dickens: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Essential Tolkien: The Hobbit and the Fellowship of the Ring
Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon by Garrison Keillor
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway
Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Politics:
If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans by Ann Coulter
An Inconvenient Book: Real Solutions to the World’s Biggest Problems by Glenn Beck
Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World by Bill Clinton
What We Say Goes by Noam Chomsky
Beyond the White House by Jimmy Carter
Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them by John McCain
Obama: From Promise to Power by David Mendell
Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin
The Assault on Reason by Al Gore
The Reagan Diaries by Ronald Reagan

Religion & Spirituality:
My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers
New Day, New You by Joyce Meyer
3:16: The Numbers of Hope by Max Lucado
Bringing Peace to a Changing World: Bible Study with Jimmy Carter
The Bible: A Biography by Karen Armstrong
What’s So Great about Christianity by Dinesh D’Souza
Inspired By…the Bible Experience: Complete TNIV Bible
NKJV: Word of Promise – New Testament
Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment by Deepak Chopra
The Gospel According to Judas by Benjamin Iscariot by Jeffrey Archer

Self Development:
Guided Meditation by Jack Kornfield
The Art of Power by Thich Nhat Hanh
I Dare You by Joyce Meyer
Maximum Confidence by Jack Canfield
The Astonishing Power of Emotions by Esther & Jerry Hicks
The Science of Being Great by Wallace D. Wattles
What on Earth Have I Done? by Robert Fulghum
Not Easily Broken by T.D. Jakes
You: Staying Young by Michael F. Roizen & Mehmet C. Oz
Ageless Face, Ageless Mind by Nicholas Perricone
Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life, 8-CD Set by Wayne Dyer
Healthy Sleep by Andrew Weil
Become a Better You by Joel Osteen
Notes from the Universe by Mike Dooley
The Golden World by Robert A. Johnson
The Law of Attraction CD Collection by Esther Hicks
The Sacred Contract of America by Caroline Myss
Life’s Missing Instruction Manual by Joe Vitale
50 Psychology Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon
Quiet Strength by Tony Dungy
How to Make Someone Love You Forever! in 90 Minutes or Less by Nicholas Boothman
The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
Meditations for a Miraculous Life by Marianne Williamson

Other Notable Releases:
Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Clean Up Your Writing by Mignon Fogarty
Unlocking the Secrets of 2012 by John Major Jenkins
Don’t Know Much about Anything by Kenneth C. Davis
The Meaning of It All by Richard P. Feynman
The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
NPR Driveway Moments for Dads

We currently offer four different shipping methods for shipping audio books: USPS Media Mail, USPS Priority, UPS Ground, and UPS 2nd Day Air.

Merry Christmas!

September 18, 2007

eMusic Launches DRM-Free Audio Book Store

The website eMusic, which is second to iTunes in music download sales, announced yesterday it will be offering DRM-free MP3 downloadable audio books through their subscription service.

N.Y Times Article: EMusic to Offer Audiobooks

They’ve launched the beta version of their audiobooks section and are currently offering 1011 audio books from publishers: Random House Audio (about 500 titles), Penguin Audio (about 150 titles), Hachette Audio (about 15 titles), Blackstone Audiobooks, and NAXOS AudioBooks.

eMusic’s press release announces “eMusic Introduces World’s First Audiobooks Catalogue in MP3“, which isn’t entirely true as we’ve been selling MP3 audio book downloads for over a year now and have over 1500 titles to choose from. And other publishers such as NAXOS AudioBooks, Christian Audio, Sounds True, The Teaching Company, and Nightingale Conant have made their catalog available on MP3 through their websites. But we won’t hold that against eMusic, as this is a welcome development in the trend towards audio books being offered in the universal DRM-free MP3 format so that customers can play their audio books on all portable audio players and not have to worry about compatibility issues or other frustrations surrounding DRM-ed files.

At LearnOutLoud we gave their new audio book program a test run. It requires signing up for the eMusic 14-day free trial which gets you 25 free downloads and 1 free audio book. You give them your credit card and you’re billed at the end of the trial if you don’t cancel.

The eMusic (music) download subscription is separate from the audiobooks subscription. When you sign up for the 14-Day trial that includes 25 free music downloads and 1 free audio book download, you are essentially signing up for 2 trials. From there you can choose to continue either subscription. The eMusic (Music) Basic Monthly subscription gets you 30 music downloads for $9.99 per month and the subscriptions and downloads scale up from there. The eMusic Audiobooks Basic subscription gets you one audiobook credit per month for $9.99 a month, and 2 audiobook credits a month for $19.99 a month. The audiobook credits do not roll over to the next month, so if you forget to use your credits within the month, then you lose them.

We signed up for the trial and then needed to download the eMusic Remote which is where you browse all their music and audio books. Once you’re in the eMusic Remote application, then downloading music and audio books is quite easy. It’s basically a one-click purchase when you click their download button and the entire audio book is queued up to download in the eMusic Remote Download Manager.

They break audio books up into quite a few tracks. For the 11-hour audio book we downloaded it was 113 tracks which I guess amounts to about 10 tracks per hour. There wasn’t an option for a single bookmarkable AAC file, which would be nice for iPod users so they don’t have to remember what track number they’re on. They do offer their audio books at a bit rate of 64kbs which is higher than Audible.com’s highest bit rate of 32kbs.

eMusic is digital watermarking their audio book files, which means they are stamping information onto the audio file, so if their files do show up on peer-to-peer sharing networks they can trace the files back to their original source. We’re unsure if this watermark contains customer info, and if so, we’re unsure what the repercussions would be for customers who shared their files on peer-to-peer sharing networks.

Browsing the eMusic store is very fast and easy. They feature 14 categories and numerous subcategories to browse in the audiobooks section. Audio samples are in .m3u which loads and plays in whatever your default player is for .m3u files. Overall it was a good user experience downloading audiobooks from eMusic, and we’ll stay subscribers and see what more they have to offer.

We welcome eMusic to the wonderful world of audiobooks!

February 15, 2006

Another Free Audiobook of the Month Club

We thought we were the only ones. We were wrong.

We launched our Free Audiobook of the Month Club last month (go get Siddhartha if you haven’t already!) because we thought the world could use more high-quality free literature. Turns out that another site, ChristianAudio.com, is doing the same thing. Cool.

This month’s free audiobook over there is G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. I wasn’t familiar with this title but I have listened to another of Chesterton’s titles St. Francis of Assisi. I didn’t like that one much but that was mostly due to poor sound quality. This one sounds much better. It’s the full-length version (over 5 hours) and costs $20 or more to purchase elsewhere.

Kudos to ChristianAudio.com for doing this. The more free audio we can get out there the better!

Anyone aware of any other Free Audiobook of the Month clubs we should know about? 🙂

September 18, 2005

Some Hot Deals…

We haven’t had any blog posts in our “Hot Deals” section for a while so I figured I’d blog about a few ways that you can save money while you are Learning Out Loud. Here goes…

4 GB iPod Minis for $149 at Costco – With the release of the new iPod Nano, Minis just aren’t as hot. But at $149 for 4 GB that’s one helluva deal. Sure they are a little bigger but for $100 less (plus the option for those nice pastel colors) it just might be worth taking on the extra heft…

10% off coupon for…EBay! – This is the first time I’ve ever seen EBay offer a coupon. You can find a ton of used audio and video material on EBay ranging from Tony Robbins to Pimsleur foreign language courses. This coupon will allow you to take off 10% of any purchase up to a max of $25.

Books on Tape 30th Anniversary Sale – Books on Tape has been around for 30 years?! Wow. And they are celebrating like they mean business. Pick up Deepak Chopra’s Golf for Enlightenment for $7, George Orwell’s 1984 for $14 or choose from hundreds of other titles.

That’s all for now. If you know of other hot deals related to audio or video learning, send me an e-mail so I can put them up here in the blog. Happy shopping!

April 26, 2005

Rent Me

Sometimes buying an audio book is just too pricey. I mean it’s about 10 bucks more than a CD and you might not even like the book after you’ve spent alot of time on it. Well, now there’s a few options for those that don’t like to buy audio books. Netflix showed the renting over the internet can be big business and now tons of audio book rental outfits are showing up like crazy. In the future me and david will be recording a podcast that will try to navigate a path through the murky world of online audio book rental services, but for now I want to give you some links to pages I created as guides to a few of them:

April 8, 2005

Audio Samples For Rent!

Just wanted to give a note to all of you that the Brian Tracy Author Page is up and running and looks to be a great addition to our other author pages. Tracy is best suited for those that are interested in pursuing or enhancing their business career. From what I’ve looked over today, he has many titles that zero in particularly on sales and marketing.

In other news, I wanted to give you all some more links to sites that feature audio samples. This time I’m focusing on audio membership sites, figuring they have to feature some kind of sample right? Well…..

Audioqueue is first up. With categories like “Appearance” and “Feelings” I felt like their page layout was a little too… inaccessible maybe? I went on, hoping for detailed product descriptions repleat with 20 minute audio samples for you all to hear. I was again, as per usual in this hard, hard life, disapointed. No samples, just a picture (sometimes even that isn’t available) and a brief description followed by a plea to sign up for their 20 buck a month club. I might check the competition out before I go with you guys.

Audio-To-Go features no samples and their product pages are so brief they just fit them all on one big page insteand of breaking them up individually. I think I like them, but I guess their presentation doesn’t it really do it for me either. Seems to me, these audio book clubs are forming a pattern of no audio samples. How am I supposed to know what I’m getting from a picture? What if I’m one of those guys that’s just casaully browsing. What if I’m not an avid reader and I don’t know who an author is? This stuff seems catered to people in the know and I feel like a loser.

Audiobookclub, what my good friend and co-worker david has called the BMG of audiobooks, has alot of samples! I’m listening to this one from James Patterson’s “3rd Degree”. I have absolutely no idea what this book is about other than that it seems to be some kind of detective story involving avid runners. Hah. The audio sample is ok. For some reason I want GREAT quality audio samples because I feel I deserve nothing less when I get something for nothing.

Simplyaudiobooks was by far my favorite of the audio book rental sites. This is just the tops as far as presentation and product description. They basically have all your basic top sellers but alas, they don’t have any audio samples. My search was in vain, but I left the place with a smile so I guess the world isn’t so bad after all.

Ok, so this sort of turned into an amateur hour referendum on the state of audio book rental subscription sites. I didn’t mean for that to happen and I think its giving me an idea for a new article. As it stands, i found no audio samples on any of these sites but I hope the information is useful nonetheless. At least it was for me. I think I’ll go now. Final thoughts? Uh, the grapes I’m currently eating in front of the computer are real sour. Yeah! Have a good day wherever you are.

September 15, 2004

Books on Tape sale

Books on Tape is discontinuing their current rental program. As part of this they are selling all of their rental products at rental prices. This represents a huge savings of 80% of more on most titles. For example, I just picked up an unabridged copy of Bill Clinton’s autobiography “My Life” for around $30 (it normally runs over $100). Unfortunately they are pretty picked over but it might be worth your while to hop over there and check out what they do have left.

http://www.booksontape.com