When Reading's Not on the Agenda

If you've been promising yourself that you'd read Don't Think Pink: What Really Makes Women Buy?and How to Increase Your Share of this Crucial Market, but just haven't found the time, Soundview Executive Book Summaries might be able to help. Last Wednesday, the company launched an audio chip with condensed audio versions of some of the bestselling business books of 2004 crammed onto it. If you're short on time, but own a PDA or a smart phone, you can buy the chip and listen to the crucial points from 30 business books like Crucial Confrontations, Scoring Points and True to Our Roots, distilled into 20 minutes worth of listening.

Soundview, a subscription-based service that claims 50,000 subscribers from around the world, has been offering executives and executive wannabes summaries of bestselling business books since 1978. The summaries come in print, audio and digital form, and the books that are summarized are chosen by president Chris Murray, who, by dint of reading more than 1,000 business books a year, claims the title "the world's most well-read man." Story continues below ?

"We offer 30 summaries a year [to our subscribers], rather than stand-alone sales of individual summaries," says company spokesperson Tim Cifelli. "This helps get new or even lesser known authors out in front of potential readers who rely on Soundview to pick the books for them."

The new $80 audio chip is being produced in conjunction with Audiofy, which produces the compact memory cards?about the size of a postage stamp?on which all of 2004's 30 book summaries are stored. "To now have [these books] available on memory chips that can be played in a number of mobile devices better serves on-the-go business people looking for the convenience of having the information gleaned from these books no matter where they are," says Cifelli. Like any good executive, Soundview's also looking to the future. "We also intend to offer industry focused chips that cover Sales and Marketing Strategy Books for example, or a Leadership Book Series," says Cifelli. "We're moving forward with these."