Listening Zone Offers Foreign Language Audiobook Downloads

by Kevin Howell -- Publishers Weekly, 1/29/2008 8:16:00 AM

The U.K. audiobook publisher Rickshaw Productions Limited recently expanded its offerings with the launch of The Listening Zone where consumers can download nearly 600 books in foreign language translations, including Dutch, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. (Audible.com offers more than 400 foreign language titles, but in Spanish only.)

Audiophiles can download Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives in Dutch; Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in French; a Spanish short story collection featuring Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle in Spanish; Machiavelli’s The Prince in Italian; or an Edgar Allan Poe collection of horror tales in German.

"As an audiobook publisher, it was my desire to join the 21st century by setting up a download site for audiobook distribution," said Lindsay Fairgrieve, who founded Rickshaw Productions in 1998 and launched The Listening Zone in November 2007. "However, as I started investigating, it became obvious that there was a plethora of audiobook download sites, and that they were pretty much the same—different visuals, fairly similar content—and all in English. I wanted The Listening Zone to offer something unusual. I wanted to offer works of literature to a variety of different audiences—Russian fiction for Dutch readers, or Spanish classics for French readers."

“Offering a showcase for new writers and musicians as well as mainstream titles on the same site makes perfect sense,” said Fairgrieve. To that end, she created four other areas to The Listening Zone that would showcase average citizens, up-and-coming talents and professionals in their field:

BenchTalk offers interviews with everyday people found sitting on public benches at parks, railway stations, airports, hospitals, galleries, etc.

The Speaker Zone features professional public speakers talking about their careers in areas like voiceover work, music composition and teaching.

The New Writers Zone and New Musicians Zone both feature work by new writers, musicians and publishers from around the world, written or performed in their own language.

The Listening Zone is searchable by language, author, narrator, publisher and subject. Downloads on the site are priced in U.S. currency, converted from the Euro (which explains prices like $34.74 for a Dutch translation of Hamlet or $14.22 for an abridged Spanish translation of Pride and Prejudice).

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