Audioboo, the audio sharing service, has teamed up with Unbound, a new online book publishing platform, to offer free access to excerpts from the latest audiobooks.
Audioboo and Unbound have teamed up to allow online readers to listen for free to the first few chapters of an audiobook created by the crowd-funded publisher on the sound-sharing site. They then have the option to download the entire book for free at a “competitive price decided by the author”.
Launched at this year’s Hay Festival by the Co-founder of QI John Mitchinson and two other writers, Unbound, allows members of the public to fund and influence authors’ works at the point of creation. Each Unbound author publishes an extract from their book and a video pitch of their idea on the site in a bid to get financial support from enthusiastic readers.
The partnership has gone live with actor Robert Llewellyn's book The Man in the Rubber Mask, which details his time on the BBC's Red Dwarf, and has achieved over 20,000 listens for each of the three chapters distributed so far. The second audiobook from Unbound to go live on Audioboo will be Evil Machines, a new book of stories from Monty Python’s Terry Jones – which was indeed the first book to achieve full audience funding and be published by Unbound.
Mitchinson, the co-founder of Unbound, said: “Audioboo is the perfect fit for us. They are innovative and proactive with a very active community of users. ‘To boo’ has already become a verb. Unbound is about bringing writers and readers closer together and you can’t get closer than listening to the author read their own work, wherever and whenever you want to.”
Audioboo’s founder, Mark Rock added: We’ve [already been] working with a number of newspapers, radio stations and broadcasters. I feel like now is the time to expand and see how social audio can work alongside other publishing industries.
“We've spent a long time perfecting our payments platform and we intend to use it in as many creative ways as possible. It seemed a natural move to extend our model to audiobooks. We only need to put a K on the end of our URL, after all.”
Separately Audioboo has signed a deal with Harper Collins, which will allow the sound platform to make its audiobook catalogue available to its audience. Costs will vary depending on access and each book.
Unbound allows book lovers to pledge anything from £10 which will get them a first edition of their chosen book, as well as access to an author’s digital shed so they can put forward ideas to the writer while the creative process is in flow.
Pledges go up to £250, which will get the ‘patron’ lunch with the author, a first edition, an ebook version and full access to writer via their digital shed on Unbound.co.uk.