Archive for February, 2009

Wow, we are humbled and delighted by the feedback we have received since launching Traveling Classics 3 days ago. The response has been more than we could imagine. It is encouraging to see how many people have enjoyed the product and told us about it.

It has also been really fun to see Traveling Classics featured in various blogs around the web:

• The Unofficial Apple Weblog
• Readerville
• Booklist Online

We have heard two themes develop from all the feedback we received. Firstly, you like the player and hope that we can release many more titles. Plus, that you really liked the Tell-Tale Heart Friday the 13th Giveaway. So I have news on both counts.

First off, we will be releasing many more titles in the coming weeks. We have just submitted the Treasury of Beatrix Potter and the Communist Manifesto for review by Apple so they should be released in a few days. Plus, we are working through another 4-8 books to be released in the next two weeks. Stay tuned.

Secondly, we have decided to keep the Tell-Tale Heart as a FREE application. We received such a great response from people that said they liked being able to try out the player on a short, fun book before committing to one of our longer titles.

Again, Thank You all for helping to make the launch of Traveling Classics a great success.

I wanted to give my customers a quick survey of the costs of various audiobook buying options. I looked at Audible, and iTunes, and Amazon.

1. Audible price based on buying a Platinum Annual Pass for $229.50 and getting 24 credits. This is the lowest per book price they offer. Would be $14.95 on Gold Monthly plan.

Plus, only Traveling Classics comes with the full text of the book, automatic scrolling or automatic bookmarking!

Steve Jobs famously said that he thought Americans have stopped reading ( NY Times ). A claim that he backed up by saying that “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.” At Today’s launch of the new Amazon Kindle 2 (Kindle 2
) Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, said that “Long-form reading is losing ground to short-form reading.” ( Ars Technica )

Add into the mix the latest Google announcement that they will begin offering a customized version of their Google Books website specifically targeting mobile readers like the iPhone and Android ( Google Search Blog). This will make available 1.5 MILLION books to anyone with a browser enabled smart phone.

So were does that leave us. I have been giving the whole area of reading a lot of thought recently. Not just because I think it is fascinating to see how one of the oldest media forms is evolving, but as I launch Traveling Classics it has now become a matter of fiscal concern. Here are a few of my thoughts.

I think that since the rise in popularity of the Internet has actually increased the total volume of reading that the average person does each day. I for one know that I read more online than I ever did before. I probably read 50+ blog posts, 75+ news articles, and countless technical resources each day. This adds up to many, many books worth of words a year. But also means that at the end of the day it is often the last thing that I want to do to sit down and read some more. So I tend to fill my off-time with other media. Like catching up on TV shows on Hulu or listening to audiobooks, podcasts, or best of all NPR.

This is where I think the market is heading with more and more people focussing their reading time each day on short form media like blogs and articles, and then focus their spare time into more passive entertainment. Which I hope means that they will find Traveling Classics useful as they fill the need to hear great stories without requiring your full and undivided attention.

Traveling Classics wouldn’t be anything without its books. They are the core feature of our offering. So when we were going to launch we had a tough choice ahead of us to pick the handful of classics to start with. We wanted to choose a selection that would be large enough for us to be taken seriously and for the product to be a success, but of course we didn’t have time to do all 1,800 Librivox recordings.

So we starting looking for our favorites. Plus, we scoured the web looking for any lists of the most popular books in classic literature. This left us with about 24 titles. We then went and listened to the recordings of each of these to determine which were of a high enough quality for consideration. We only wanted recordings made with a single narrator and where the readers voicing seemed to fit the general feel and type of the novel. We now had our 7 books.

• Treasure Island
• Art of War
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Pride and Prejudice
• The Tell-Tale Heart
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

We then began the process of taking these recordings, cleaning them up to remove any audio that would be distracting when listening to the book all the way through. Then we added them to our player and shipped them off to Apple. We hope you like them.

We plan to constantly add new books to the collection. If you have a particular book that you would love for us to offer, please let us know at contact@travelingclassics.com and we’ll do our best to move it to the top of the queue.

This is the first of hopefully many posts to the Traveling Classics blog.