300. These. Are. PODIOBOOKS!
In case you missed it, our little “active” title counter ticked over to 300 yesterday. That’s 300 freely available serialized audiobooks you are free to enjoy. We didn’t make a big stink about it for a couple of reasons.
First, 300 is a great number. We’re really proud. When I was busy shopping this idea around in mid 2005, I told the fantastic folks at Libsyn that I thought we might have 30 books some day. Thirty. Seems I was off by an order of magnitude. Yet they’ve been fabulous partners in this venture and haven’t complained once about carrying the extra load. Without Libsyn, we wouldn’t be here. So mad props to them.
But 300 is just the start. Fellow purveyor of free audiobooks Librivox boasts over 2,000 public domain titles available. Simply Audiobooks has over 11,000 titles you can rent in a Netflix-esque fashion. And Audible outsizes us all with over 50,000 titles available for purchase.
Second, our “counting” is a bit funny. And that makes it hard to point to which book earned the coveted 300th title. In reality, our database has 376 entries in it. Some books never got off the ground. Some books have been removed at the authors request. Some are under a sort of “suspension” because there’s been too few and far between. Some were removed because they never were — and never will be — completed. Occasionally, these titles a can come back live on our site, which happened to one today, pushing us to the fancy-looking 300 number.
So yes, I’m very happy to see us hit 300. But we’ll hold off on throwing a big party just yet. We still have some work to do. In the meantime, I hope you find many titles on our site to enjoy.
- Evo
March 28th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Evo!! Kudos on the great news.
I joined back in 2005 (or so) when the # of subscribers was just a few thousand. I’ve downloaded so many podiobooks that I think I will never catch up!
Keep it up! It’s giving me fantasies of writing my own.
March 28th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
That’s fantastic! And I think the more you have, the more you’ll get. Here’s hoping 2009 is a good year for Podiobooks.
March 28th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Congrats on reaching a new plateau. It’s good to achieve numbers with zeroes in them.
I like better that you’ve achieved this with high standards for quality, too. I notice that That Other Audiobook Outfit just recently upgraded their DRMed content to the same bitrates you’ve had as a standard for quite a while now. Their old standard was a bit low. But Yay for them, too.
One good thing can be said for my PD submissions. I can sure do a lot of them, since I don’t have to write them first — which brings the next number-with-zeroes a bit closer in time.
We all do what we can. You’ve made that possible. Thanks for that.
Griz
March 30th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
WooHoo!
It’s certainly a growing medium that’s for sure. Having ridden the Podiobooks bus four times so far I have only good things to say about it. I can’t imagine a better way for new authors (at least those with a modicum of acting talent) to meet the world and make an impression.
Here’s to thousands more and may the quality of free podcast novels rise exponentially as well.
April 4th, 2009 at 7:44 am
Nice one, Evo! 300 is a cracking figure. Definitely one to be proud of, as it signifies Podiobooks’ growing success. Congratulations and thank you for allowing all the writers on the site a chance to have work distributed.