Media Archive

Our free media archive gives you the opportunity to listen to, or view, a selection of Edinburgh International Book Festival events and related material and gives a good flavour of our programme. Most recent material is now downloadable as mp3 files so you can listen to the events on your iPod or in the car… anywhere you like really! We stage over 700 events and activities for adults and children each August featuring authors from across the world. You’ll find lively podcasts with author chats and interesting snippets, unedited author events in our audio archive (including transcriptions) and selected highlights in our video archive.

Search tips

To find material on specific authors or subjects enter a name or keyword into the search field - for example: Atwood, Salman, Louise Rennison etc or food, travel, crime, politics, environment, education, Africa, children, schools, poetry etc.

Technical requirements

The latest events in the media archive are downloadable mp3 files (events older than 2009 are streamed so cannot be downloaded). Given that the file size is about 45Mb on average, a broadband connection is required. To save a file to your computer, right click on the link on the author talk page and save it to your hard drive.

Our archive audio and video recordings are playable on most PCs if you have Windows Media Player. If you don't have it, you can download it, free, by clicking on the icon on the left. Microsoft no longer makes a Mac-compatible version of Windows Media Player. To listen to these files, you can download a free QuickTime add-on (Windows Media® Components for QuickTime, by Flip4Mac™) from Microsoft. Although our audio files are quite large they are hosted on a special 'streaming server' which means that even on a slower modem connection you should be able to start listening to the recordings very quickly, as the media player downloads enough information to start playing without waiting to download the whole file.