Audio recording

Famed writer and activist Cory Doctorow is selling the audio version of his upcoming book via Kickstarter to sidestep the walled garden of Amazon-owned audiobook platform Audible.

The author Bill Bryson is sitting before a lectern in Audible's London headquarters, narrating his latest book, a disquisition on human biology called The Body: A Guide For Occupants. Seen through the window of the recording booth, Bryson's face is largely obscured by the microphone in front of him, but his voice is clear and measured.  Read more

More than 100 pages of court filings precede a hearing expected this week in the US publishers' lawsuit of Amazon's Audible. Publishers allege copyright infringement, the audiobook company asserts fair use.

The Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies today (August 23) has asked the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York to enjoin Audible from providing to its audiobook consumers the machine-generated text of literary works "without any authorization from, compensation to, or quality control by the copyright owners."

Bestselling crime writer Mark Billingham has just joined the judging panel of Audible's New Writing Grant: The Crime Edition - the UK's first ever audio-first writing grant. In an exclusive piece for FutureBook he highlights that writing for audio is a skill distinct from novel writing, and champions the need to treat audio as a more than a mere add-on, but as a separate storytelling form.