RA for All: June Is Audiobook Month: Here Are Some Links and Ideas to Explore

The Audio Publishers Association leads the celebration of "June is Audiobook Month," and boy do they have reasons to celebrate as the audiobook market posted another year of double digits gains!

This is the best time of year to gather your resources on audiobooks, update them, and save them to help you help patrons and yourselves all year long.

But before I get to my favorite resources and links for audiobook info I need to make a blanket statement-- Listening to a book is THE SAME as reading it. If you do not agree with this statement, you are wrong. I am normally very understanding of differences of opinion, but this one is 100% wrong. Okay, moving on....

To follow this year’s fun, the official hashtag on all social media for the month is #loveaudiobooks. There is a lot of info no matter which platform you prefer.

Here is the link to everything I have ever tagged “audio books” which is about half reviews of audiobooks and half resources. There are many resources using the link.

My favorite overall resource for audiobook RA is Audiofile Magazine. It has reviews, articles on audiobook topics, snippets of narrators reading, and of course....all of the Audie nominees and winners.

RUSA has a great list each year of librarian recommend listens called, The Listen List. Click here to see all of the winners from 2012-2017 in an easy to use table with tabs.

Audible is a good way to see “patron” comments [aka customer reviews] on audiobooks. The 5 star and 1 star reviews are the most effective. You will get a heads up on problems readers have had with narrators this way and see why people love or hate something.

Publishers Weekly has a tag for all of the audiobook industry news. Click here to stay up to date.

Booklist’s Audiobook coverage is led by my friend and colleague Joyce Saricks and includes a lot of work by Mary Burkey also. Click here for Booklist Reader audiobooks content. I particularly love Joyce’s annual "Voice of Choice.” This year the designee is Bahni Turpin. The June 1 issue contains the Audiobook Showcase.

Don’t forget that since 2014, NoveList has included specific appeals and reviews for audiobooks. I explained it in detail in this post.

One of the [many] reasons that audiobooks are so popular right now is because of the parallels rise in the popularity of podcasts. Take a look at this list [via Buzzfeed] of 13 podcasts matched to you based on your favorite books. Why not use this list as the inspiration to do your own list? Or short on time? Just print this one, cut out the pictures for the podcasts, and make a display with the books?

Finally, my favorite newly discovered resource is a direct result of the APA’s schedule of celebration this year-- their blog tour. I don’t want to lose this list of blogs that focus on audiobooks, so I copied and pasted it with the links below this post. The schedule is not as important as the fact that these are blogs that spend time on audiobooks. I specifically want to call out Book Riot which has very regular and extremely useful Audiobooks coverage. You can pull it up at any time with this link. But visit any or all of these 30 resources for more audiobook content.

Now get listening!

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