AudioBook SYNC Blog

From the chatter we’ve been hearing through your Tweets, Instagram and Facebook posts, and assorted blogs, newsletters, and other news we’ve found online, it sounds like this year’s AudiobookSYNC program found some happy listeners! And we want to hear more from you.

In Week 12 of SYNC 2020, we turn our attention to how questioning what we believe we understand can lead us to more accurate truths. This week’s pair of free audiobooks explores the history and future of our Earth’s inhabitants using different literary approaches. Both are performed by full casts.

This week we feature a pair of titles published and made available to SYNC participants in conjunction with the We Need Diverse Books (#WNDB) campaign by authors and others in publishing. Thank you, Listening Library, for lending your support to including these in SYNC this season.

Week 8’s theme this SYNC season is one of romance. However, our two audiobook selections are very different in their interpretation of that broad category of story type, and the performance choices are also unlike each other. Here’s another opportunity to explore how a theme can produce two very different listening experiences.

Our Week 6 pair of free audiobooks comes from the Listening Library imprint of Penguin Random House Audiobooks. In a necessary aside here, the week's titles and theme were selected months before current events in the U.S. However, the timing of the content's arrival seems prescient.

Week 4’s free audiobooks bring listeners an #OwnVoices pair that include a stage play and a novel, each based on real events. Thank you L. A. Theatre Works and Scholastic Audio for these outstanding and free audiobooks.

Week 2 of this year’s SYNC program provides participants with one #OwnVoices work of realistic fiction and another providing a journalistic account of factual events that are as compelling as anything a novelist might create.

With just one week to go before SYNC 2020 opening day, it’s time to make a few last minute announcements to make sure listeners in your locale can access their free audiobooks.

Three more weeks! And we know you still have questions. Some are about accessing free audiobooks for teens during the program and other questions we are hearing include: why for teenage listeners?

We are just over a month from the launch of our 11th season. For those new to SYNC, there are a few details that can being you up to speed quickly: SYNC Audiobooks for Teens provides free to keep downloads of excellent audiobooks. Only individuals, not libraries or other institutional collections, can access and keep these files. And when we say keep, we mean keep. Each title is available for one week only so even if you don’t plan to listen to that title during its week, make sure you grab it because when the week is gone it is, too.