Everything And Nothing

The New Yorker Fiction Podcast

The New Yorker has an interesting monthly podcast. They ask authors to pick one of their favorites from other authors in the New Yorker archives - and read it aloud.

This month, T. Coraghessan Boyle reads Tobias Wolff’s short story “Bullet in the Brain.”

Art on the Go

Take a guided tour of many museum exhibits in San Francisco, New York City and other places - from wherever you are. Several museums are publishing their exhibit tours as podcasts - free of charge - on iTunes.

You can check them—and others—out in the iTunes Museum Room.

Poetry for your ears (and your iPod)

British entertainment company 57 Productions has launched a Web site that allows users to download and listen to poetry on their MP3 players and iPods.

The modern poetry site, called iPoems, was launched on October 3. About 1,000 readings from poetry written in English are available for 95 cents for each audio poem or $1.80 for a video poem (or a Flash poem, as they call it).

The company offers a free one month trial membership, and after, subscriptions are $18 per year.

Harvard podcasts available to everyone

You don't have to be a registered student to download free podcasts of Harvard University Extension School's Computer Science E-1 course, Understanding Computers and the Internet. Some of the lectures are videocasts; others are audiocasts. You can subscribe to the podcasts through iTunes or your favorite podcast client via this feed.

This is an introductory level course, covering the basics of hardware, software, the net, and multimedia - the lecturer is David Malan. Supporting materials, including exam questions and answers, are available to all at the course site.

Other schools are distributing podcasts of lectures to registered students. Harvard joins Stanford and Princeton in offering podcasts of Ivy League lectures and events to the rest of us. 

[ via tuaw.com ]

GastroCasting

Podcasting has hit the culinary set. Eric Steinman, in Bon Appetit (Jan. 2006), named what he saw as the early standouts:

• On Food - Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Hsiao-Ching Chou talks food with culinary heavy hitters
• Remarkable Palate - Personal chef Mark Tafoya comments on the New York food scene
• Baking with the Bard - Seventeen-year-old John Dudley shares his favorite recipes with warmth and humor (couldn't find a direct link to this)

These, and others, can be found at www.itunes.com. And Steinman calls it culinary podcasting, but the foodies seem to be calling it foodcasting. So if you want to find some new selections, enter the term on Google or your search engine of choice.

FREE iPod-ready stories for kids

Storynory provides FREE iPod-ready classic and original children's stories. Listen online or download for free. Many Christmas stories are featured now.

[ via Micropersuasion ]

Penguin Books is podcasting

From the Penguin Podcasting blog:

The Penguin Podcast is a fortnightly episode of book extracts, author interviews and features from Penguin Books UK.

Available in a number of formats, suitable for most computers and MP3 players, the Penguin Podcast is also available in an enhanced format for iTunes and iPods with colour screens.

You can subscribe to future episodes of the Penguin Podcast via the iTunes podcast directory or using an RSS reader.

[ via Boing Boing ]

Public domain books read aloud podcast

Librivox is a podcast of volunteers reading public domain books aloud. The editors pick a book and put out a call to volunteers in internetland to read it aloud chapter by chapter.

[ via Boing Boing ]

And, if you'll recall, when Slate.com started reading their magazines aloud in July, I wondered when this was coming. I was worried about copyright issues - but Rex said I would be OK as long as I stayed away from bestsellers. This site seems to be getting around it by reading only "public domain" items.

If I only had the time and the money to follow all of my ideas, I might produce enough from this blog to at least pay for my Typepad account! ;)

Holtzbrinck podcasting audiobook excerpts

Holtzbrinck has begun podcasting samples from their audiobooks, from thriller writers like Mary Jane Clark and Joseph Finder to a live recording of Michael Cunningham reading from Specimen Days. They are also podcasting author interviews - horror writer Douglas Preston gets interviewed about his new novel, Tyrannosaur Canyon.

[ via Galleycat ]

(In case you were wondering, the best audiobook I've ever listened to was A Confederacy of Dunces. I have never laughed so hard in my entire life. I had to pull over once, as I recall, on my road trip to New Orleans, to let loose without injuring myself or my fellow drivers.)

Podcast Your Blog With Talkr

An interesting concept - write your blog posts and then make that content available in audio format for anyone to listen to your blog.

This is what Talkr does using text-to-speech conversion technology that takes a blog's RSS feed and converts such machine-readable content into speech, creating MP3 files of each individual post. You can then subscribe to the Talkr service and get those MP3s via RSS and into your podcatcher.