MAIN NEWS HEADLINES
March 22- March 29, 2007 Edition
Random House
Adds Audiobooks
To Popular Widget Sampling
NEW YORK, NY/3/16/07–After recently launching Insight, its content search and browsing service containing over 5,000 of its print books, Random House, Inc. has announced the extension of the Insight platform to include most of its audiobooks in print in the U.S. For the first time, audio clips from more than 2,200 new and backlist Random House Audio Publishing Group titles are available through the Insight widget, live today at www.randomhouse.com. The titles are published by the eponymous Random House Audio adult and Listening Library children’s imprints of Random House, Inc., the US division of Random House, the world’s largest trade book publisher.
The objectives for the Insight audio offerings are similar to those for its print titles: to provide an easy-to-access discover and sample experience for all users. As it did for its print titles in Insight, Random House has created a “widget” which will allow any user to copy and paste a fixed amount of listening content for sampling on a website. By employing the cutting and pasting functionality an individual can easily add the widget to a personal website, social network page, or a blog. As with the text-based widgets, the buy button on the Insight audio applications can be easily customized to lead to any retailer’s e-commerce site, which enhances the sales potential of the audio title to consumers.
The Random House Audio Group titles which now can be discovered, sampled aurally, and syndicated through Insight are productions based on print books released by Random House, Inc. publishing houses as well as by outside print publishers. They include US Senator Barack Obama’s readings of his Grammy-winning memoir DREAMS OF MY FATHER and his #1 bestseller THE AUDACITY OF HOPE; LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov, read by actor Jeremy Irons; THE NANNY DIARIES novel by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, read by Academy Award-winning actress Julia Roberts; and all six of J.K. Rowling’s HARRY POTTER books, the fastest- and largest-selling audio series in history, narrated by Jim Dale, also a Grammy honoree.
Madeline McIntosh, Senior Vice President and Publisher, Random House Audio and Large Print Publishing Group, said, “Consumers like to sample an audiobook, much as they do recorded music, before they buy it-which is why we long have made it a priority to have a sample available from nearly every one of our productions. Now, the Insight program makes it so easy to distribute those samples on the Web to everyone: especially booksellers, librarians, authors, and the consumers themselves. We are thrilled by the increased exposure Insight will give to our productions.”
The Random House Audio titles on Insight can also be sampled on the Audio Group’s dedicated website, www.randomhouse.com/audio.
As with its print book widgets, the Insight audiobook search and browse experience was created in-house by the Random House, Inc. technology group. Random House, Inc., the world’s largest English-language trade book publisher, publishes many of the foremost and most popular fiction and nonfiction authors in hardcover, trade and mass market paperback, audio, electronic, digital, and other formats. Random House, Inc. (www.randomhouse.com) is the US division of Random House, the book division of Bertelsmann AG, one of the world’s leading media companies. Books published by Random House, Inc. have won the most major awards of any publishing company, including the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Newbery Medal. Among the dozens of Random House, Inc. publishing divisions and imprints in the US are the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, the Crown Publishing Group, the Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, the Knopf Publishing Group, Fodor’s Travel Guides, Random House Children’s Books, the Random House Publishing Group, and the Random House Audio Publishing Group. Random House’s publishing companies in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Japan, and Korea are publishing leaders in their territories.
