audiobooks

Nearly 30 years after Amazon started as an online bookseller, products like the Kindle and services like Audible have kept quite an emphasis on reading. Now, in the lead-up to Black Friday (which Amazon also really focuses on), the company is running a massive sale on Audible subscriptions. Audible Premium Plus is currently 60 percent off — dropping to $6 per month from $15. Plus, it comes with a $20 Audible credit. It's even cheaper than the basic Audible Plus plan, which costs $8 per month.AudibleIt's wildly discounted…

Crime writer Ian Rankin’s novella opens with a body in the foyer of a gleaming new residential high rise. Overlooking London’s Hyde Park, the building’s flats are affordable only to the super-rich. The residents – who are now murder suspects – include an art dealer specialising in modern sculpture; the wife of a gangster who is wanted by police; a princess from an unnamed Gulf state, plus her phalanx of bodyguards; a Russian multimillionaire; and, in the penthouse, a property mogul who may or may not be up to his neck in…

Spotify, on Thursday, expanded its partnership with Google Cloud to use large language models (LLMs) to help identify a user's listening patterns across podcasts and audiobooks in order to suggest tailor-made recommendations.Artificial intelligence-powered LLMs such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google Bard, are trained on a massive amount of data to generate text and other content. Google Cloud, owned by Alphabet, has several LLMs such as PaLM 2, Codey, Imagen and Chirp that are trained on text, codes, images, audio and…

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Spotify said on Tuesday that users of its premium services in the UK and Australia would now have 15 hours of free access to audiobooks a month, with the feature expanding to the US later this year.The music streaming giant is looking to supplement its earnings with other revenue-generating formats such as podcasts and audiobooks. The launch of its audiobook service in the US last year challenged Amazon's Audible.Spotify last year laid out plans to get one billion users by 2030 and reach $100…

A vivid and detailed exploration of childhood trauma and tumultuous world events, Lessons, Ian McEwan’s 17th novel, spans the life of Roland Baines, who comes from an emotionally withdrawn army family and is sent to boarding school at the age of 11. There he meets a strict piano teacher, Miriam Cornell, who, when Roland hits a wrong note, reaches under his shorts and pinches his leg. Three years later, Miriam lures the 14-year-old Roland into a sexual relationship that ends up derailing his life. He tries and mostly fails…

Amazon has brought back one of its most popular deals ever, but it’s a bit different this time. Instead of offering three months of Amazon Music Unlimited, they are offering three months of Audible Premium with the Echo Dot. So you’re getting the Echo Dot (5th Gen) which is typically a $49.99 value, along with three months of Audible Premium for just $22.99. That’s not a bad deal at all. Especially since Audible Premium is $14.95/month. If you were looking to get the bigger Echo, that deal is also available. You can get…

Posted in: Comics, Manga, Yen Press | Tagged: anime, Goblin Slayer, I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level, Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, light novels, manga, The Executioner and Her Way of Life, Yami-hara, Yen Audio, Yen PressYen Audio announced 5 new audiobooks at Anime Expo 2023, including Yami-hara, Goblin Slayer, Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?At the Yen Press Industry Panel at Anime Expo 2023, Yen Audio announced the upcoming release of five new audiobook…

Spotify HiFi, the company's lossless audio streaming tier, will reportedly be launched by the streaming service soon. The company initially revealed its lossless streaming audio tier over two years ago, but is yet to make an official announcement regarding its release date. The new lossless tier will compete with streaming services like Apple Music and Amazon Music, that also offer support for streaming lossless audio. However, users will reportedly have to pay a costlier subscription fee to…

It’s a sunny morning in south London when Cyril Pennington, a Jamaican-born, London-based bus driver, decides to take his children to get ice-cream at the park. This isn’t exactly straightforward, as Cyril has five children with four mothers who, until now, have never met, on account of “Cyril himself as more of a people person than a father. Sadly, for his children, this sociability didn’t extend to the five of them in a way that was mutually beneficial.”Nonetheless, by the end of their day out, Cyril has accomplished…