Category: News

Deuce Audio / Audible.com / iTunes Audiobooks

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio News

Audiobook Publisher - Deuce AudioAudible.comScott D. Danielson, along with myself, is an SFFaudio founder. He’s now working as a reviewer, and as our “Web Kzin.” But his SFFaudio cred doesn’t end there. He’s also a long time Audiofile magazine reviewer, an Audie Awards judge, was a long-time columnist for SFsite and is a professional Science Fiction author. He’s also been running a little audiobook company and he’s just posted a story of interest about it to his personal blog…

Scott writes:

“I’m in the final stages of preparing audio for submission to Audible.com. My company, Deuce Audio, will soon have stuff for sale on Audible and iTunes, just as was planned when I started the darned thing almost three years ago. More on that sometime in the future, I’m sure. I haven’t even told the authors that these will be on there because I’ve told them that before and it didn’t happen. This time, the contract is signed, and the stories will be out there soon. So I’m closer, but I won’t believe it until I actually download one.”

There are other folks in similar situations to Scott and his Deuce Audio, other companies with Science Fiction and Fantasy and Horror audiobooks that are making deals to get their content onto Audible.com (and therefore iTunes too). We’ll try to let you know as they make their announcements. The future never sounded so good!

posted by Jesse Willis

Audiobook company Brilliance Audio purchased by Amazon.com

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SFFaudio News

Amazon.com buys Brilliance AudioAmazon.com has purchased audiobook publisher Brilliance Audio! Reportedly, Brilliance, a two decade old player in the audiobook business, will continue to run as an independent company. But the acquisition is part of an Amazon plan to “expand audio selection to customers.” Though Amazon does not say it in their press release, doubtless this is a part of their plan to split the downloadable audiobook market. Currently, Audible.com all-but-controls the audiobook download market with a extremely successful DRM‘d-audiobook download website and an exclusive contract with iTunes. Brilliance has a back catalogue of more than 1,000 titles and Amazon sez it has plans to increase the new audiobook the current production schedule at Brilliance.

posted by Jesse Willis

Steve The First & Steve The Second

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio News

CBC Radio OneGood news everyone! Just announced over on the Inside The CBC blog was a rough summer 2007 outline of programming for CBC Radio one. In the section on CBC drama it was announced that the summer season will include a re-broadcasts of the 2005 comedy Science Fiction series Steve The First, and 2006 follow-up series Steve The Second – both these shows were written and starred Canadia: 2056 star/scribe Matt Watts.

Unfortunately there was no word on the languishing Adventures Of Apocalypse Al, comedy/SF series that was penned by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski. That show was recorded last year but has yet to be broadcast.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Audible.com has an exclusive Orson Scott Card short story Pretty Boy

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio News

Audible.comAudible.com, which long ago had much original SFF content, may be gearing up for a renewed push to get more. I have evidence: First there’s James Patrick Kelly’s StoryPod – Volume 1 of which has just wrapped. Second, there’s a new and exclusive Orson Scott Card audiobook on Audible now. These two facts, combined with some other evidence I’m not able to disclose at this time, make me fairly confident that Audible is looking to expand their original SFF content. WOOHOO!

The new Card story is called Pretty Boy. It first appeared in Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show issue #2. Unfortunately it is very expensive through Audible. It sells $17.95 on Audible.com itself and $15.95 on iTunes (Audible has a monopoly on audiobooks in the iTunes store). I can’t imagine other circumstances I’d do this, needless to say audio is the medium we prefer, but for the sake of budgets, you can get the original text version for only $2.50 through Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show (and it comes with a bunch of other choice content- including another OSC story in audio AND SFFaudio co-founder Scott Danielson’s excellent short story: Adrift). Here’s the detail on the audio edition…

Pretty Boy by Orson Scott CardPretty Boy
By Orson Scott Card; Read by Scott Brick
1 AA File – 47 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audible.com
Published: 2007
How do you systematically destroy a child with love? It’s not something that any parent aspires to do, yet a surprising number come perilously close to achieving it. So begins Orson Scott Card’s new story from the Ender Universe, a profound meditation on parents and offspring focusing on the childhood of one of Ender’s Battle School challengers, Bonzo Madrid, and the circumstances that lead him to his unique place in the Game.

posted by Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Challenger tackles City At World’s End by Edmond Hamilton

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SFFaudio News

Meta SFFaudio - SFFaudio Contest - Make audiobook win an audiobook Aspiring audiobook narrator James Kocher has taken up our challenge! He’s planning to record Edmond Hamilton’s City At World’s End.

Born in 1904 Hamilton was a contemporary of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, and like them sold many stories to Weird Tales magazine. He is also credited with co-creating, with E.E. “Doc” Smith, the Space Opera sub-genre of Science Fiction. In 1946 he married fellow SF author Leigh Brackett. Hamilton not only wrote novels, he also wrote comics too! One of his more memorable being Action Comics #300 (starring Superman). Readers have even remarked on the similarities between that issue and Hamilton’s City At World’s End.

Now to City At World’s End: Just imagine what might happen to a city that is thrown far into a far future…

The pleasant little American city of Middletown is the first target in an atomic war – but instead of blowing Middletown to smithereens, the super-hydrogen bomb blows it right off the map – to somewhere else! First there is the new thin coldness of the air, the blazing corona and dullness of the sun, the visibility of the stars in high daylight. Then comes the inhabitant’s terrifying discovery that Middletown is a twentieth-century oasis of paved streets and houses in a desolate brown world without trees, without water, apparently without life, in the unimaginably far-distant future.

Below is the “inspirational art” for James’ audiobook…

City At World's End by Edmond Hamilton

posted by Jesse Willis