Audio Books Catch Fire On Mobile

Online, June 8, 2011 (Newswire.com) - The growth in mobile broadband has lead to a fast adoption of mobile audio book services in the last 2 years. Millions of downloaded audiobook-applications on all mobile platforms clearly indicate that listening on the go is most conveniently done with smart-phones. Audiobooks are most often consumed on the go and smart-phones connected to the Internet provide all you need to be entertained while traveling.

One of the success stories are applications offering the popular LibriVox.org library for mobile phones. Millions of applications have been downloaded so far.

Jagamagas Audiobooks is the newest addition of mobile services in this surging market. What makes Jagamaga Audiobook stand out from the other companies offering Public Domain content?

Jagamaga claims to be the only source of enhanced Public Domain audiobooks.
"We give listeners the same listening comfort with Public Domain audiobooks usually only attributed to professionally produced content.", says founder Andreas Mehrens.

The audiobook production at LibriVox are done by volunteers under difficult conditions at home. As a result the library does not deliver consistent quality.

"This means that some recordings are of less-than-optimum audio fidelity, and some feature background noises, non-native accents or other perceived imperfections in comparison to professionally-recorded audiobooks." (Quote by Wikipedia)

Jagamaga is enhancing the quality of public domain recordings thus allowing to enjoy these recordings in professional quality. Whereas LibriVox's goal is to record every book that's in the public domain, Jagamaga wants to provide a selection of the most popular titles in a professional format.

Founder and CEO Andreas Mehrens: "When listening on the go audio quality becomes critical because you already have to deal with background noise, you don't want to have additional hiss and hum in your earphones when travelling on a plane or in a car. We make this books a pleasure to listen to, even under noisy conditions."

Jagamaga selects outstanding productions of the large LibriVox content. Audio and narrating quality and popularity of the title are the criteria. The Jagamaga catalog focuses on 'must read' and 'top 100' bestsellers, books with outstanding narrator performances and titles much in demand. Only a couple of hundred titles account for 90% of downloads. Jagamaga's current catalog holds about 80-90 percent of the most downloaded titles in a much more pleasurable format.

The recordings of LibriVox volunteers undergo professional curation at Jagamaga. Unwanted noise such as hum and hiss are eliminated using advanced audio optimization technology. Careful editing turns the audio books into a enjoyable industry standard format without unwanted disruption. Mastering evens out narration volume and lends the narration sparkle, volume and tightness - just like in professional recordings.

The resulting clear and undisturbed narration is making for a great listening experience rivaling high priced products.

Jagamaga has been working on a catalog of perennial classic audiobooks and now offers 800 titles with thousands of hours of professionally curated LibriVox audiobooks.

New titles are regularly added to the catalog.
Apart from enhancing audio to a professional level the mobile audio book optimization process transcodes the files to a bandwidth friendly audio formats without quality degradation.
The various formats are compatible with all mayor player formats.
Jagamaga offers the catalog to be integrated into existing distribution outlets via an API.

The company's main mobile product, "Jagamaga Audiobooks", works across multiple platforms and operating systems, and supports Android, Apple and BlackBerry. The release of the PlayBook application is imminent.

The Jagamaga Audiobooks applications are now distributed by large network operator and aggregators and gives its service a wider reach than any other mobile distributor of LibriVox content.

With now well over 50.000 downloads prior to the official launch, Jagamaga looks into expanding it's services to more platforms. Mr Mehrens said the company will launch two additional applications on Flash/AIR and HTML5 website that can work across other smart-phone platforms and desktop computers.

The main sources of revenue are licencencing the enhanced catalog, selling of premium applications, and offering promotional opportunities to publisher. According to Andreas Mehrens publishers already have indicated interest in the promotional opportunities of the app network.

What's next: "We have focused on the audio processing but now we want to improve the usability of our mobile applications and add some more sophistication to the applications. We're also excited to create HTML5 and Flash apps to extend our reach."

The company is headed by a audio engineer and audio book enthusiast Andreas Mehrens. The company is self-funded based in Munich Germany and founded in 2005.

Contact Info:
If you'd like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview with Andreas Mehrens, please call him at +49 89 1892-1200 or e-mail Andreas at [email protected]
Website: http://www.jagamaga-audiobooks.com/