Useful news feeds at Audible.com

If you are looking to stay “on top” of all the latest audiobook releases, there are a variety of sources. Most of the different audiobook publishing houses and audiobook stores have email newsletters, or even paper catalogs they will send you in the mail. I’ve signed up for a lot of these, and find them useful.

But the best source for audiobook releases news I’ve found are the RSS feeds offered by Audible.com. They have feeds for the latest releases, but they also have feeds for best sellers from various lists (NYTimes, etc.), best sellers in various categories, and feeds for specially priced titles, including free content. Audible’s feeds used to be awful, abbreviated entries that were almost useless. But at some point they got a whole lot better, and now tell you the book title, author, and give the full description for the book. They even link to an audio sample of the book, for you to listen to before you buy. Since Audible has the largest catalog of audiobooks, this is about as comprehensive a source as you can find.

Unfortunately, while I would like to link directly to Audible’s feeds page, their horrible web site makes it impossible to directly link to some pages, including that one. So I can only describe how to navigate there yourself.

  1. Start at the Audible.com home page.
  2. Scroll down to the bottom of the page.
  3. Click the “RSS” link, which looks like this:

Audible RSS Link

Find a feed that appeals to you, and subscribe to it in your usual newsreader, e.g., Google Reader, NewsGator’s excellent readers, etc. (If you don’t know what a newsreader or RSS feed is, this What is RSS? article is a pretty good introduction.)

Channel-Specific RSS Feeds

For those of you who may not be interested in everything I write (hi Mom, sorry about all the technology stuff), here are some channel-specific RSS feeds.

For those of you who may not be interested in everything I write (hi Mom, sorry about all the technology stuff), here are some channel-specific RSS feeds:

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New RSS 2.0 Syndication Feed

This weekend I spent a few hours writing a script to provide an updated RSS syndication feed, conforming to the RSS 2.0 specification. It adds publication times and categories to the items in the feed, which might make it a little more informative in your news aggregator. If you’re subscribing to this weblog, please update your subscription to use the new feed.

This weekend I spent a few hours writing a script to provide an updated RSS syndication feed, conforming to the RSS 2.0 specification. This is basically an upgrade to the RSS 0.91 spec, which adds some additional metadata. In particular, it adds publication times and categories to the items in the feed, which might make it a little more informative in your news aggregator (it does in NetNewsWire).

So, if you’re actually subscribing to this weblog, please update your subscription to use the new feed. The old one continues to work, but the new one is better.