Technological Trickery

We live in a gilded technological age.  Which is fabulous in many ways.....Google, blogs, iPhones, feed readers, e-readers, iKotex iPads, Facebook, Twitter, and of course, the legendary iPod.

If you're anything like A Reader's Respite, you are constantly discovering new ways to utilize all of your gadgets.  One of our favorite things is the PodCast.  Now some of you may think of these audio blogs as a chatty, hard-to-understand, bad-audio pain in the neck.  But there are some very, very well-done podcasts out there that are professional, well-organized and present very useful and thoughtful information.


Here are some of our favorites:

These podcasts are updated every Thursday and run about 20 minutes or so.  They include NPR's book picks, reviews, interviews and publishing news.  NPR also has a nice option that allows you to subscribe in a blog format in your feed reader if you don't want to subscribe to the podcast.

Librarian Nancy Pearl (of Book Lust fame) also a Book Lust Podcast here in Seattle that run about thirty minutes each. Very cool.  She used to have regular book review podcasts on NPR, but they seem to have stopped producing those last summer (boo hoo).

Of course the NYT Book Review offers a podcast....would you expect anything less?  'Nuff said.

The BBC's World Book Club is perhaps our favorite book related podcast.  It's a once-a-month production that runs just shy of an hour and always features a well-known author who discusses their books in front of an audience and takes questions.  It's fantastic!  And like NPR, the BBC offers you the option of subscribing to their RSS feed if you'd rather skip the audio and read it on your computer screen.

Also, don't forget your local library.  Hundreds of libraries, such as the Seattle Public Library, feature regular podcasts with book reviews and new releases that are very fun and informative.

When do we find time to listen to these?  We play them while we're making dinner, in the car, and we've even been known to fall asleep at night with our little iPod earphones plugged in.

Do you subscribe to any of these?  Have suggestions for other great book-related podcasts?  Tell us about them!

And for those of you who are history fanatics like A Reader's Respite, tune in tomorrow and we'll give you a list of all the history podcasts we are addicted to.