Pan Macmillan are going into GoSpoken, the mobile reading platform. As regular readers of this blog will know, we are big fans of mobile reading and believe it has a hugely significant role in the future of how we read. Our lives are becoming more and more device centric while our devices get better and better. Moving in early with mobile distribution makes sense and we look forward to expanding our mobile list.
All our ebooks and a significant proportion of our audiobook titles will be available. You can download the press release below and read coverage in the Bookseller.
4 Comments
Congratulations! So totally with you on the mobile reading (and listening)
Here’s a quick question – probably very dumb – that has always concerned me with stuff like GoSpoken.
Most mobile phone contracts have a limited data package (with the exception of the iPhone I guess). For example my Blackberry allows me (on Orange) something like 8MB of transfer a month. Audiobooks – even if they are mercilessly compressed, and I hope these will not be – are long, and audiofiles very large. Can you tell me how the transfer of many many megabytes is factored into the price, if at all? i.e. if I pay £5 for the book, how do I avoid also paying punitive fees (and time) to download the files over the mobile network? Or is it assumed that the download is done via wifi? I know the App store allows a maximum “network” download of 10mb before insisting it is done over wifi.
Cheers, P
Thanks!
Peter- I’ll get back to you on that!
Hi Peter
Go Spoken do recommend that you only use their service if you have a data plan with your phone operator. I bought an audiobook from them, and it cost me a fortune to download it! – a very expensive experience! But I’m now on a different Virgin tarif of 30p per day for quite high quantities of download. This makes it a lot cheaper, so the price is still on a par with the book.
However, GoSpoken are moving over to a new codecs which they claim is half the size of MP3 but twice the quality. It means that downloads should now be a lot quicker and lighter, and therefore accessible to a much wider range of phones. I haven’t tried one of the new ones yet, but they say there is no compromise on quality.
Might be worth giving it another try on your Blackberry.
Katy.
Thanks Katy. A friend tried it on the BB which didn’t work out for him. I’ll try again. Also – new codecs? Probably AAC? Sounds like there could be all sorts of interoperability issues there…. I will definitely check it out but am not convinced!