Jottings of note:
Revamped speech
While audiobooks are one category of listening to text, the Amazon Kindle represents a different, proprietary platform for ebook listening: Amazon has started rolling out a new and revamped text-to-speech feature on classic Kindle devices. (Before this, the feature had been available exclusively on Kindle apps.) Earlier experiments with audio listening on Kindle devices were discontinued with the release of he Kindle Paperwhite in 2012. The new installation of this feature underlines words as they are voiced — a first for Kindle e-readers.
Month and day
We see a social mention of International Podcast Month on this first day of September. Google’s AI informs us that it cannot find a website for that commemoration, but we do see that Apple Podcasts has celebrated it in the past. A more universal observation is International Podcast Day on September 30. That initiative provides a robust suite of information, recommended actions (“Explain to someone what a podcast is and get them hooked”), celebrative graphics, and a short history. All this produced by the same people who bring us The People’s Choice Podcast Awards. But International Podcast Day is recognized on September 30, as we have recognized in past years.
Gaining, Losing, and Complexity
We receive notice of an upcoming webinar produced by Sounds Profitable: The Podcast Landscape 2025. It promises an exploration of a conundrum: “Every year podcasting gains listeners, but also loses them.” Complexity thickens the business environment: Audiences dip in and out for single shows, or listening in ways the creators never planned for. This webinar draws a clean topical line: “While there is no shortage of advice about how to grow a single podcast, how do we grow podcasting?” The info in this presentation is culled from survey interviews of more han 5,000 18+ Americans. Free registration HERE.
September 2, 2025
