Audio News Briefs

Digital media distributor OverDrive has launched a new in-school service, AudioBook Classroom (www.audiobookclassroom.com), that enables K-12 schools to offer 1,001 contemporary and classic works in 29 subjects. The titles are available for simultaneous use and can either be played on school computers (Windows XP or greater, with a Mac version "coming soon") or transferred to students' personal MP3 players, including iPods. More info at www.overdrive.com.

This year's Grammy Award nominees for Best Spoken Word Album include Michael J. Fox's Always Looking Up (LJ 6/15/09), Richard Dreyfuss and David Strathairn's The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (LJ 5/1/09), Nelson Mandela's Favorite African Folktales (a 2009 LJ Editors' Fall Pick), and Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking (LJ 6/1/09; a 2009 LJ Best Audio, p. 54). For the complete list of nominees, visit bit.ly/grammy_nominees. Winners will be announced on January 31, on CBS.

Operation Warrior Library, an organization responsible for shipping thousands of books and DVDs to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, is currently in need of audiobooks for injured soldiers. Authors and publishers wanting to donate audiobooks should email warriorlibrary@gmail.com. Others wishing to help can support both the organization and those authors who have donated works to its cause—e.g., Brad Meltzer, Alice Sebold, and Seth Mnookin—by purchasing their books at paulmalmont.com/shop.

Newly available from Recorded Books as a library-edition CD and from HarperAudio as a retail-edition CD and digital download: the abridged audio recording of Sarah Palin's No. 1 New York Times best seller, Going Rogue: An American Life, which the former Alaska governor/Republican VP nominee herself reads.

BBC Audiobooks America now carries five of Edgar Award-winning novelist John le Carré's 21 novels: Call for the Dead (1961), A Murder of Quality (1962), The Looking Glass War (1965), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), and The Constant Gardener (2001). The first four are dramatizations under three hours long and starring Simon Russell Beale; The Constant Gardener is an unabridged 17-hour recording read by Michael Jayston. More info at www.bbcaudiobooksamerica.com/library.