Archive for category General

Dear Customers,
We are sorry about yesterday’s (November 16) server problems. We upgraded our servers to enhance our performance and generally improve stability. During this problem we introduced an issue that caused the Download Edition to stop downloading books. As soon as this was brought to our attention we began working on the issue. As of 8am (EST) all known issues have been resolved. If you continue to have issues downloading your books please contact us at contact@travelingclassics.com.

Thank you for your understanding.

Regards,
David Smith (Owner, Traveling Classics)

We recently got asked to talk about how we developed AudioBookShelf.

Here is the result:
http://blog.pragmaticstudio.com/2009/11/audiobookshelf-interview.html

We just wanted to share a little bit about our perspective on the recently released Audiobooks update that changes the app from downloading the content to streaming it. We hate it. We KNOW that it makes it a much less useful app, and that lots of people are annoyed by this. We’re very sorry, but we received unilateral word that if we didn’t make this change, it would be pulled from the app store. Permanently. So what choice did we have?

As a reminder, we’re literally a mom and pop shop – we’re not a big company, we’re just trying to make great apps that you all love, that will allow us to make ends meet. We feel like we got punched in the gut when we got the call that our all-time most successful app was being pulled from the store. But don’t turn around and kick us because the app isn’t as useful anymore. We’re trying here, people.

On a more positive note, we really want to thank all of our customers who have sympathized with us during this situation – we really appreciate all of your support. Ultimately, the reason we created this app is to get great works of literature out there for you all to enjoy, and we’re so so glad that we’ve succeeded. Thanks for the encouragement; you all make it worthwhile!

Dear Customers,

We regret to inform you that our Audiobooks app will be temporarily unavailable for download. Late this afternoon we were notified that it can no longer be offered in its current form. It will be re-designed to stream the audio content rather than storing it on your device.

Understandably, we were as dismayed as you are (I’m sure) at this news, but we are working around the clock on an update to get it back in the App Store and hope that it will be back early next week. If you already have the app, it should continue working as before. In the mean time you can still access the content of the app yourself at www.librivox.org.

The good news is that we were already planning to release an update to add some additional functionality (search by genre/narrator, volume control, reviews of books, etc) and make sure that it is compatible with the new OS. The bad news is now we have to redesign it first. So rest assured that those updates are coming, but not as soon as we had hoped.

Regards,
David

On a whim, this morning I checked to see how many of our 1,800 audiobooks had never been downloaded. I expected that this number would probably be into the hundreds. Well, I was wrong. In just the first 6 days since launch all but 58 books have been downloaded. Or, put another way 97% of titles have been read by at least one person.

I was at first hesitant to give details about which these were because that would likely skew the experiment a bit, but I couldn’t help but sharing how interesting a collection this list comprised.

• Bible (WEB) NT 20: James
• Bible (YLT) 24: Jeremiah
• Bible (YLT) 25: Lamentations
• Bible (YLT) 34-37: Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah and Haggai
• Byways Around San Francisco Bay
• Child-life in Art
• Christmas Poetry and Hymn Collection
• Chronicles of Canada Volume 05 – Seigneurs of Old Canada : A Chronicle of New World Feudalism, The
• Chronicles of Canada Volume 09 – The Acadian Exiles : A Chronicle of the Land of Evangeline
• Chronicles of Canada Volume 12 – The Father of British Canada; A Chronicle of Carelton
• Chronicles of Canada Volume 15 – The War Chief of the Ottawas : A chronicle of the Pontiac war
• Custom of the Country, The
• Dialogue Between a Methodist and a Churchman
• Drums of Jeopardy, The
• Familiar Letters on Chemistry
• Few Figs from Thistles, A
• George Bernard Shaw
• Grandma Janice’s Poems and Stories
• History of England from the Accession of James II – (Volume 2, Chapter 08)
• History of England from the Accession of James II – (Volume 2, Chapter 10)
• History of England from the Accession of James II – (Volume 3, Chapter 13)
• History of Henry Esmond, Esq., A Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Queen Anne, The
• Hollow Needle, The: Further Adventures of Arsène Lupin
• In the Desert
• King in Yellow (part 2), The
• Little Lame Prince, The
• Michael O’Halloran
• Moths of the Limberlost
• My Prime of Youth is but a Frost of Cares
• Peterkin Papers, The (version 2)
• Plan and Preface to a Dictionary of English
• Principles of Economics, The Appendices
• Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood
• Road Builders, The
• Sekar Karya
• Selected Poems of John Clare, Volume 2
• She and Allan
• Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52, The
• Short Nonfiction Collection Vol. 003
• Short Nonfiction Collection Vol. 007
• Short Nonfiction Collection Vol. 009
• Short Poetry Collection 005
• Short Poetry Collection 012
• Short Poetry Collection 016
• Short Poetry Collection 017
• Short Poetry Collection 020
• Short Poetry Collection 028
• Short Poetry Collection 033
• Short Poetry Collection 036
• Short Poetry Collection 039
• Short Poetry Collection 057
• Short Poetry Collection 063
• Sister Rosa: A Ballad
• Soup of Alphabets, Volume 003
• Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, The – Version 2
• Venus Transiens
• Western United States, The
• What Diantha Did

——
Update: (6/22/2009) There are no longer any lonely books in the Audiobooks library. Everyone has been listened to at least once.

We have been blessed with some really kind reviews for our apps. I wanted to point out a few for your reference.

First, we got mentioned on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tuesday. [link]

Now, we just got word that our premium apps were featured on TapCritic. [link]

Check it out, if you want some unbiased thoughts about our applications.

As a follow-up to our post about why we made Audiobooks free. Here is a brief overview of how we keep it free.

When dealing with the transmission of such large amounts of audio content there are significant costs involved. We host a mirror of the LibriVox repository. Both to not place an undue burden on them and also to take responsibility for uptime and availability. In the first 72 hours after launch we have served up over 1 Terabyte of content and downloads are growing at a delightful rate. This bandwidth is relatively cheap but by no means free. In addition to the physical costs associated with running the App there are also the costs of our time and energy in creating and maintaining it.

To finance this effort we are selling Boutique Advertising within the main player. Basically, we sell 25 advertising slots each month. These ads are shown whenever you listen to a book. We preferred this approach to the typical mass media advertising networks because it gives us a far greater degree of control over what we advertise (no spam/scams here) and also provides a much more reliable source of revenue. To learn more about advertising with us please check out our Advertising Page.

I have been asked why we decided to make Audiobooks free, rather than charging even $0.99 for it. Especially, since we also market so many other public domain titles as paid premium apps and Audiobooks is arguably many times more valuable than any of these. I thought our view on this might interest a lot of people — so here it is.

First, there is the philosophical part of it. The Librivox Project is awesome. We love and appreciate that so many people take the time to record these treasures of literature for the world to enjoy. When these readers put in the effort to make a recording they are doing so with the goal and intention of spreading their content as widely and freely as possible. We wanted to honor that by providing a venue for their work to be disseminated widely within the iPhone community without hindrance. Especially, since it is such an apt medium for the platform.

Secondly, we put a lot of time and effort in our premium titles. We trim and edit the audio to remove any distractions. We format and synchronize the words for the book to play along side the narration. Also, we are very selective in which readers we choose to ensure that our customers are getting an excellent experience. There is no way, logistically, that we could put that amount of time and attention into the content of 1,800 titles. There are some great titles…and some not so great ones. We felt that by making it free, we aren’t setting up pretensions that customers are getting access to 1,800 premium titles.

Finally, we just like the exposure that a free app gets. In its first couple of days Audiobooks has already surpassed by a large margin our total downloads for all the other premium titles combined. We are currently the #2 app in the Books store and that visibility can only do good things for a small, independent operation like ours. We have a lot of other apps and ideas up our sleeves for the months ahead. Many of which will be best executed if we can show ourselves as a leader in the field of iPhone publishing.

I have been working on a Ruby script that collects the rankings of all my apps in the various iTunes Stores around the world. I found the initial results pretty interesting.

Best Ranking Paid Apps

I am not sure what to think of the results, but it is clear that different countries have very different preferences. For example, Beatrix Potter does really well in commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia,…) but very poorly in the US (isn’t even ranked!).

I will keep collecting this data and start to work out trends as we add more books to try and see if broader conclusions can be made.

Oh, and we have nine new books in review with Apple. I’ll let you know once they get approved.

We hit an interesting milestone today. We have submitted 3 new books to the store:

• Robinson Crusoe
• Emma
• Anne of Green Gables

This means that we have now hit a full page of apps!

We’ll announce here once they are approved by Apple and ready for download.