As most of my readers will know I am the Hon. Secretary (and a founding member) of the Anthony Powell Society. (What do you mean you didn’t know? Where have you been! … What? “Who’s Anthony Powell?” Tut, tut!)
As a part of my duties as a functionary of said Anthony Powell Society I bring all you book lovers, and lovers of audio books, some fantastic news! I knew this was on the way, but it has arrived much sooner than I expected.
Audible have today released a complete, unabridged, audio book of Dance, read by Simon Vance who has an excellent (English) voice and does a lot of audio books – so be sure he’s good! There’s an interview with Simon Vance here.
So far the recordings are available only via Audible’s download facility, which means you have to install their “file manager” on your PC to play what are essentially MP3 files, although they should be able to be ported to your iPod or similar (although I haven’t yet tested this).
The recordings are issued (and are purchased) in four trilogies, with each trilogy containing a separate MP3 file for each book. Beware these are large downloads (average 100MB per file, and there are 12 of them!) unless you have a fast broadband connection.
What is amazing is that the recordings are not expensive. Each trilogy is just $34.95 from www.audible.com or £27.59 from www.audible.co.uk, unless you already subscribe to Audible when they are hugely discounted. When you get to Audible just do a search on “Anthony Powell”. As Audible is an Amazon company expect to see these appear eventually on Amazon. I’m told there will be a CD version available later in the year.
This is an astonishing 80 hours of audio, so clearly I’ve not yet been able to listen to it all, but from the little snippets I have heard the recordings are most excellent.
Extra kudos to Audible as they have given me a free download of the complete four trilogies – Woo! – so I have no excuse not to listen to and review them. Expect a review here in a few weeks time. No even I can’t listen to 80 hours of audio that fast!
Now, where else can you get 80 hours of quality audio for under $140 or £110 ????
Keith,Thanks for linking to my interview. Simon Vance is my favorite narrator and it was a pleasure to interview him. I'm also an Audible user. I listen to all of my audiobooks on my MP3 player. It's easy to copy them there. If your MP3 player is connected to your machine when you download the audiobooks, they will copy over automatically. Otherwise, it's an easy push of a button later. I hope you enjoy these!Jennifer
Hi Jennifer. Thanks for the comment. I've got a new iPod on order (due to arrive tomorrow) as my old one died and hadn't yet been replaced. So I shall have fun loading it up over the weekend. Keith
I will definitely be interested in the CD version when it's available.