Give Librivox a Hand

in Audio Books | February 24th, 2010

Per­haps you’re already famil­iar with Lib­rivox. If not, you should be. Lib­rivox pro­vides over 3000 free audio books. The books (all in the pub­lic domain) are record­ed by a pas­sion­ate com­mu­ni­ty of vol­un­teers, and they’re all made freely avail­able to you. (See their cat­a­logue here.) Mil­lions of peo­ple have down­loaded their books. And, as you can imag­ine, the web host­ing costs can run quite high. For the first time in 4+ years, Lib­rivox is look­ing to raise some mon­ey. Please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion, how­ev­er small or large, and sup­port this very worth­while project.  You can find more infor­ma­tion and donate here.

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Disney Kindle Commando Sunday is Here!

in Amazon Kindle, Audio Books, Books, Literature | December 27th, 2009

kindledisneyToday’s free sto­ry: When They Were Call­ing You in for Din­ner (lis­ten here) or read it in the Charles Riv­er Review [To down­load the sto­ry and lis­ten on your MP3 play­er, just right-click and “save file as…”]

Dear OC read­ers,

About a week ago, I post­ed here about my Pub­lish­ing Exper­i­ment Take 1. I spoke of the need for authors (Yes, Authors!) to make exper­i­ments in new media and pub­lish­ing. Well, now’s the time to put my fic­tion where my mouth is. Today I’m launch­ing my col­lec­tion of short sto­ries, A Long Way from Dis­ney, on Ama­zon’s Kin­dle plat­form at the price of $.99.

Direct link to buy A Long Way from Dis­ney on Ama­zon.

Please vis­it SethHarwood.com/kindle for more info. You can buy the book if you have 1) A Kin­dle 2) an iPhone/iPod Touch or 3) Any PC com­put­er!

Easy! See you soon with more free sto­ries and results from this exper­i­ment.

PS: If you’d like to hear more free sto­ries like this, you can check out new posts today at CrimeWAV.com and SethHarwood.com. You can also get the sto­ries direct­ly from iTunes.

Seth Har­wood pod­casts his ideas on the pub­lish­ing indus­try and his fic­tion for free at sethharwood.com. He will be teach­ing an online course (The Essen­tial Art: Mak­ing Movies in Your Reader’s Mind) with Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies start­ing in Jan­u­ary. His first nov­el, JACK WAKES UP, is in stores now.

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Orhan Pamuk Reads Vladimir Nabokov

in Audio Books, Literature | December 14th, 2009

nabokov quiz

Image by Giuseppe Pino, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

If you don’t already know about it, The New York­er Fic­tion Pod­cast (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) fea­tures authors read­ing the works of oth­er major authors. One of the lat­est and great­est exam­ples: Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 win­ner of the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture, read­ing from Vladimir Nabokov’s “My Russ­ian Edu­ca­tion” (MP3 — iTunes — RSS Feed).

With­in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books, we have sev­er­al oth­er good reads from this series, includ­ing Paul Ther­oux read­ing Borges, Jef­frey Eugenides read­ing Harold Brod­key, Richard Ford read­ing John Cheev­er, and T. Cor­aghes­san Boyle read­ing Tobias Wolff.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Free Download of A Confederacy of Dunces

in Audio Books, Literature | December 11th, 2009

A quick note: Audi­ble is cur­rent­ly run­ning a nice deal. Click here to get a free down­load of the 1981 Pulitzer Prize win­ning nov­el, A Con­fed­er­a­cy of Dunces. (Move quick­ly, it’s prob­a­bly avail­able for just a short time.) You can also down­load pret­ty much any audio­book you want from Audi­ble, with no strings attached. I’ve includ­ed more info on that stand­ing offer here.

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Uranium Wars: A Free Audio Chapter

in Audio Books, Science | September 17th, 2009

Just a quick fyi: Audible.com is giv­ing away a free chap­ter (in audio) from a new book, Ura­ni­um Wars: The Sci­en­tif­ic Rival­ry that Cre­at­ed the Nuclear Age (pre­view it on Ama­zon here). Writ­ten by Amir Aczel, a skilled pop­u­lar sci­ence writer, the book takes a close look at the sci­en­tists who dis­cov­ered the destruc­tive poten­tial of ura­ni­um and launched the begin­ning of the nuclear age. Since the book has been get­ting good reviews, I thought that I’d flag this free give­away. Also, as men­tioned here before, Audi­ble runs a reg­u­lar pro­mo­tion that will let you down­load a free audio­book of your choice (for exam­ple, Ura­ni­um Wars) if you start a 14 day free tri­al. Once the tri­al is over, you can con­tin­ue your Audi­ble sub­scrip­tion, or can­cel it, and still keep the free book. The choice is yours. You can ini­ti­ate that process here.

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Good “Reads” On Audible (with Freebie Possibilities)

in Audio Books, Books, Deals, Literature | August 21st, 2009

paul_austerA quick note: Audi­ble has recent­ly launched a series called the Audi­ble Mod­ern Van­guard (more details here) that brings ground­break­ing works and authors into unabridged audio for the first time. Here, you’ll find works by Paul Auster (one of my faves), Saul Bel­low, John Cheev­er, John Irv­ing, Kurt Von­negut, and William Kennedy.

There are some good “reads” here, and, unless I’m mis­tak­en, there’s a way that you can down­load one for free. I’ve cre­at­ed a page where you can get infor­ma­tion on Audi­ble’s (no strings attached) 14 day tri­al here, which gives you a com­plete­ly free down­load of any audio book you choose.

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The Future of Content Delivery

in Amazon Kindle, Audio Books, Books, Podcasts | August 18th, 2009

sigler2This pod­cast (get it here) presents the thoughts of Scott Sigler–media maven, NY Times Best­selling Author of INFECTED and CONTAGIOUS (both avail­able free as pod­casts), podi­o­book dynamo, and social net­work­ing mastermind–on none oth­er than “how will peo­ple read books in the near future?”

In this repod­cast of his keynote speech at this year’s Balti­con con­fer­ence, Scott talks about how he built a HUGE online fan base for his fic­tion, land­ed a major pub­lish­ing deal with Crown Books, reached NY Times best­seller sta­tus, and why he insists that giv­ing his fic­tion away for free is the best mar­ket­ing around.

He presents his thoughts on Big Pub­lish­ing, small pub­lish­ing, smart-phones vs. the Kin­dle, and per­haps most impor­tant­ly, lays out the meth­ods by which he pre-sold 1,500 copies of his new, self-pub­lished nov­el THE ROOKIE this April via his own web­site, scottsigler.com. That’s right: For­get print-on-demand and its high­er cost-per-book. Scott breaks down how he pre-sold enough books to pay for an entire print run before THE ROOKIE ever went to press! It’s a mod­el so far ahead of every­one else that we’ve got to take notes!

If you’re a writer or aspir­ing author, you need to lis­ten to this. And don’t let the intro scare you off.

To down­load this file and lis­ten to it on your own time, on your iPod or sim­i­lar device, sim­ple right click this link: DOWNLOAD and choose “Save Link as…” on a Mac, or “Save File” on a PC.

Or lis­ten to it right here:

Seth Har­wood, the author of JACK WAKES UP, will be teach­ing an online course (The Grip­ping Read) with Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies. And he’ll also be teach­ing an Author Boot­camp with Scott Sigler on Stan­ford’s cam­pus on Novem­ber 7 and 14. Each course only has a few slots still open.

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Junot Díaz Reads From “Drown”

in Audio Books, Books, Literature | August 5th, 2009

Junot_Díaz

Image by Christo­pher Peter­son, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

I first heard about Junot Díaz in the ear­ly 90s. He was only in his 20s, already pub­lish­ing in The New York­er, and get­ting a lot of wun­derkind talk. By 1996, he pub­lished, Drown, a best­selling col­lec­tion of short sto­ries that earned high praise. And then, things slowed down. It took a good eleven years for him to pub­lish The Brief Won­drous Life of Oscar Wao. But the patience paid off. The nov­el won him a Pulitzer in fact. And it’s an excel­lent read. Real­ly.

Hav­ing said this, I want to high­light Díaz read­ing one of his ear­ly New York­er sto­ries that also found its way into Drown. It’s called How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Hal­fie). The free audio clip, which is list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books (and pro­duced by The New York­er), has some col­or­ful lan­guage, but it’s not gra­tu­itous.

Look­ing for free, pro­fes­sion­al­ly-read audio books from Audible.com? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free tri­al with Audible.com, you can down­load two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.

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