Books on Tape Techie Time: iTunesU Podcasts

Life can be so sweet when you least expect it. It's not as if I was having a boring Friday night but certainly it was well behaved. While we here at Chez Old Grey Pony were relaxing on the sofa, eating spaghetti, listening to music and gleefully playing with our facebook pages, we couldn't help but wistfully think of our more cashed up acquaintances drinking wine and eating tapas on a restaurant patio somewhere late into the summer evening. But, ours is the fate of all who must pay off student loans and I cheerfully sat down to stroll through my iTunes podcast menu while the blueberry muffins we were baking were in the oven.

Little did I expect to come across The Greatest Podcast of All Time.

iTunesU features a brand new selection of free podcasts created and published by universities for their students and the Lit2Go (love the name) cast created by the University of South Florida is phenomenal and includes, among many others, a fantastic reading of Sense and Sensibility in the Group 9 collection and Northanger Abbey in the Group 12 collection. I don't know who the narrator is but his voice and his style of reading are excellent and it's very refreshing to listen to an Austen novel read by a male narrator for a change, and who is much more talented at reading than some of the actors narrating purchasable titles.

Lit2Go is very exciting and features many classics, too many to mention here but a quick look reveals several Georgian and Austen related works, including:

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Castles of Athlin and Dublayne by Ann Radcliffe

Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley

The Purple Jar by Maria Edgeworth

There are so many more and a quick special mention to the Brontë sisters, Sir Aurthur Conan Doyle, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Lewis Carroll and Virginia Woolf, as well as poetry and traditional readings and also another collection En Espaňol. Nice one, University of South Florida. If you do not have iTunes already, you may download it free of charge on the Apple website.

I'm going to have a good old browse through the rest of iTunesU and a blueberry muffin.

Books on Tape Techie Time: Podcasts

There are a small handful of Jane Austen related podcasts presently available through iTunes. Among the Austen podcasts however I can only honestly recommend one, but I do so warmly and whole heartedly.

The majority of the present Austen podcast selection is rather mediocre but in the Higher Education category of podcasts there is a unabridged recording of Pride and Prejudice read by Catherine Byers. There is no listing of who the book is read by in iTunes, so I didn't know the name of the narrator until I downloaded and started to listed to it. I wasn't familiar with Catherine Byers so I looked her up and it turns out that she is an actress well known for narration, has recorded more than 500 works over 26 years and was honored with an award for her work in narration. Her reading of Pride and Prejudice is superb. She has an excellent voice and is an expressive and talented narrator. This reading is better than many purchasable titles and it's available free of charge in the podcast section of your iTunes online store. If you do not have iTunes already, you may download it free of charge on the Apple website.

Books on Tape Techie Time: iTunes Audio Books

For this post I’m only talking about Austen audio books available through iTunes. Another time soon I’ll be touching on the many, many audio books available elsewhere.

In my version of iTunes there are currently over 30 Austen audio books available for purchase. Personally, I really enjoy a book on tape, especially when narrated by someone who reads aloud well. There is a large selection out there and it can be tricky to hit on the right one and disappointing if you don’t, especially if you’ve forked out anything from ten to seventy dollars. There are a few things to look for that can serve as guidelines for the uninitiated. Sound quality & narration are very important, especially in a recording you want to listen to more than once. Actors are often employed for narration and though I do like the practice, not all actors are necessarily good at voice work and narration. A lot of books on tape are read by actors whose talents are fine on screen but their skills don’t really translate to the spoken word. I recommend looking for an actor whose voice is expressive and enjoyable to listen to and preferably, who has experience in theatre or radio plays. Often Austen books are narrated by an actor who has featured in one of the film adaptations.

As far as sound quality goes, in iTunes there is a preview button feature in the space where you look up the details of a particular recording, which allows you to listen to a couple of minutes of the recording for free.

There is also abridgment to be considered. I wouldn’t normally recommend or buy an abridged edition, where some of the book is cut to make the recording shorter. But sometimes the abridging is done without losing too much around the edges, none that you would notice unless you were very familiar with the book in question, and abridged editions are almost always cheaper. It’s probable that if an abridged recording was narrated really well by a good actor and reasonably priced that I’d buy it.

I have scoured the details and listened to the previews of all the audio books available through my iTunes for a few recommendations.

Abridged:

Pride & Prejudice read by Joanna David
Recorded by Penguin Classics $AU14.99

Emma read by Fiona Shaw
Recorded by Penguin Classics $AU10.99

Mansfield Park read by Harriet Walker
Recorded by Penguins Classics $AU20.99

Unabridged:

Lady Susan, The Watson & Sanditon read by Norma West
Recorded by ISIS Audio Books $AU50.99

Pride & Prejudice read by Emilia Fox
Recorded by Naxos Audiobooks $AU62.99

Sense & Sensibility read by Susannah Harker
Recorded by BBC WW $AU46.99

These recordings aren't cheap, there's no denying that. But I've found that I've kept & still listen to a few very good tapes I have, (yep, that's cassette tapes. I still have my walkman too) especially Tess of the d'Urbervilles read by Lindsay Duncan around '90 which I snagged at a swap meet.

A note on CD burning, recordings purchased via iTunes are copy protected and it's not possible to burn them. Believe me, I've tried. But for the more virtuous among us, fear not. Burning recordings that are published by specific media is not illegal or unethical and for tips on recordings that are in the public domain, free and therefor allowed to be copied, check this space for more shortly upcoming editions of Books on Tape Techie Time.