Sound Bites

Beginning this month (day TBA), Findaway, maker of the preloaded audiobook/player Playaway®, will be offering libraries the option of reloading their players with discounted titles of their choosing, a service previously only available to its Internet and retail customers. The Library Replay Program will debut concurrently with a new, library-friendly web site, playaway.com (to replace playawaydigital.com). With some 2500 titles, Playaways today circulate in more than 11,000 libraries. On August 1, Findaway shipped its millionth unit: Learn Anywhere! Arabic, to a U.S. military library in Iraq.

For the first time in the 30-year history of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association's Christian Book Awards, an audiobook—The World of Promise™ New Testament Audio Bible (Thomas Nelson)—was named Christian Book of the Year. The recording, whose win was announced in March, beat out 230 entries from 35 Christian publishers. It is currently available as a 20-CD set (ISBN 978-0-7180-2424-6. $49.99); an MP3 version (ISBN 978-1-4185-3436-3. $34.99) is due September 30.

This month only, 225-plus Books on Tape (www.library.booksontape.com) adult audiobook titles are available for download through OverDrive® and NetLibrary® at half price. Among the discounted works are those by Maya Angelou, Judy Blume, and Deepak Chopra.

Bernadette Dunne narrates three of the audiobooks reviewed in this issue: The Calling, The Exhaustion Cure, and Audition. Who is she? Dunne's what you might call an equal-opportunity reader. In her 11-year career, the New York City native has voiced the works of everyone from actress Katharine Hepburn to National Book Award winner Richard Powers, for publishers including BBC Audiobooks America and Random House Audio. Her Audie® Award-nominated narration of Elizabeth Cohen's The House on Beartown Road (Blackstone Audio) was an LJ Best Audiobook of 2004. (LJ 6/1/04)