ENTRIES TAGGED "audio"
A Kindle developer’s 2013 wishlist
Despite a huge leap forward there's still plenty of room for improvement
2012 was a good year for Kindle developers. With the unveiling of the first-generation Fire tablet in late 2011 and the release of the KF8 Mobi format in early 2012, designing beautiful ebooks for the Kindle platform became a reality. KF8 introduced a fixed-layout specification for Kindle Fire, which opened the door to graphically rich titles—children’s books, graphic novels—in Mobi format. KF8 also greatly increased CSS2 compliance for standard reflowable ebooks, implemented a handful of CSS3 features (text shadow, rounded borders), and added support for embedded fonts. The subsequent rollout of KF8 to Kindle eInk readers running firmware 3.4 (including the new Kindle Paperwhite) and KF8’s support for @media queries to enable fallback styling for non-KF8 devices helped to increase rendering parity within the diverse Kindle ecosystem.
Is Print a Preference or a Habit?
Over on the O'Reilly Radar blog, Dale Dougherty posted on students increasingly prefering the sound of MP3 over higher quality music: [Jonathan Berger] has them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality. He described the results with some disappointment and frustration, as a music lover might, that each…
Audible CEO: Publishing Has History of Tech Ambivalence
In an interview with Fast Company, Audible CEO Donald Katz discusses the publishing industry's history of slow technological acceptance: Publishing is an industry pursuing a noble cultural calling. But publishing has always had an ambivalent relationship to technology-driven change. In fact, the music publishing business spent a whole lot of time trying to kill off the phonograph. The publishing…
Last Days of the Audiobook Cassette
In the wake of Hachette's last cassette-based audiobook, the New York Times eulogizes a format many thought was already long gone: Cassettes have limped along for some time, partly because of their usefulness in recording conversations or making a tape of favorite songs, say, for a girlfriend. But sales of portable tape players, which peaked at 18 million in…
UK Service Brings Audiobook Downloads to Mobile Phones
UK-based GoSpoken has partnered with Random House to make 50 audiobook titles available for purchase through the GoSpoken mobile download service. GoSpoken is currently aimed at early adopter UK residents who have broadband-capable cellphones (specifically, HSDPA-enabled) and mobile data plans. Managing director Tony Lynch describes the genesis of GoSpoken on the company's blog: As I travel round London, I…
Tag an Audio Clip, Buy it Later
Digital tagging and mobile downloads could reduce the line between content discovery and purchase.
Amazon Acquires Audible
On the heels of news that Amazon is struggling to keep up with demand for the Kindle (I ordered mine three weeks ago, and still no word on ship date), comes word that they're acquiring Audible.Along with the Kindle, this move makes sense for the online retailer as a bet that demand will continue to grow for books in non-print…