Libro.fm Picks: For the Tech Enthusiast

Extremely Online

The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet

By: Taylor Lorenz
Narrated by: Emily Tremaine
Length: 10 hours 26 minutes

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Acclaimed Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz presents a groundbreaking social history of the internet, revealing how online influence and the creators who amass it have reshaped our world, online and off—“terrific,” as the New York Times calls it, “Lorenz…is a knowledgeable, opinionated guide to the ways internet fame has... Read more

Palo Alto

A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

By: Malcolm Harris
Narrated by: Patrick Harrison
Length: 28 hours 19 minutes

The first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, from railroad capitalists to microchip assemblers, showing how Northern California created the world as we know it  Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate, the people are educated, rich, healthy, enterprising. Remnants of a hippie counterculture have synthesized with high... Read more

Brotopia

Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley

By: Emily Chang
Narrated by: Emily Chang
Length: 9 hours 6 minutes

Instant National Bestseller

A PBS NewsHour-New York Times Book Club Pick

"Excellent." —San Francisco Chronicle

Silicon Valley is a modern utopia where anyone can change the world. Unless you're a woman.

It's time to break up the boys' club. Incisive, powerful, and a fierce rallying cry, Emily Chang shows us how to fix Silicon Valley’s toxic... Read more

The Coming Wave

Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

By: Mustafa Suleyman
Narrated by: Mustafa Suleyman
Length: 11 hours 48 minutes

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An urgent warning of the unprecedented risks that AI and other fast-developing technologies pose to global order, and how we might contain them while we have the chance—from a co-founder of the pioneering artificial intelligence company DeepMind

“A fascinating, well-written, and important book.”—Yuval Noah Harari
... Read more

Creative Selection

Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

By: Ken Kocienda
Narrated by: Ken Kocienda
Length: 7 hours 28 minutes

This program is read by the author.

An insider's account of Apple's creative process during the golden years of Steve Jobs.

Hundreds of millions of people use Apple products every day; several thousand work on Apple's campus in Cupertino, California; but only a handful sit at the drawing board. Creative Selection recounts the life of one of the... Read more

Wonder Boy

Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley

By: Angel Au-Yeung & David Jeans
Narrated by: Kurt Kanazawa
Length: 11 hours 58 minutes

“This is the story about the brilliant tech entrepreneur Tony Shieh, best known as the CEO of Zappos.com, who sold his first company to Microsoft at the age of 24 and later embarked on using his riches to revitalize a portion of downtown Las Vegas. It’s a gripping tale of his successes and rise to fame that turned into increasing use of various... Read more

Doppelganger

A Trip into the Mirror World

By: Naomi Klein
Narrated by: Naomi Klein
Length: 14 hours 47 minutes

This program is read by the author.

“If ever a book was necessary, it’s this one.” —Bill McKibben

“Thoughtful and honest . . . Incisive . . . Klein moves her reader toward the truer grounds of solidarity in these times.” —Judith Butler

What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you... Read more

Disrupting the Game

From the Bronx to the Top of Nintendo

By: Reggie Fils-Aimé
Narrated by: Reggie Fils-Aimé
Length: 8 hours 16 minutes

“Reggie Fils-Aime is the former President of Nintendo of America and Disrupting the Game is a testament to his climb up the corporate ladder. Sprinkled with his own business suggestions, learning about his way from the Bronx to the top of NoA and his relationships with Satoru Iwata and other various video games figures was incredibly eye-opening.... Read more

All Systems Red

Murderbot Diaries: Book #1

By: Martha Wells
Narrated by: Kevin R. Free
Length: 3 hours 17 minutes

All Systems Red is the first tense science fiction adventure novella in Martha Wells' series The Murderbot Diaries. For fans of Westworld and Ex Machina. All Systems Red by Martha Wells begins The Murderbot Diaries, a new science fiction action and adventure series that tackles questions of the ethics of sentient robotics. It appeals to fans of... Read more

The Disordered Cosmos

A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

By: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Narrated by: Joniece Abbott-Pratt
Length: 10 hours 55 minutes

From a star theoretical physicist, a journey into the world of particle physics and the cosmos—and a call for a more liberatory practice of science.

A Finalist for the 2022 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
A Finalist for the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science & Technology
A Smithsonian Magazine Best Science Book of... Read more

The Chaos Machine

The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

By: Max Fisher
Narrated by: Peter Ganim
Length: 15 hours 55 minutes

From a New York Times investigative reporter, this “authoritative and devastating account of the impacts of social media” (New York Times Book Review)  tracks the high-stakes inside story of how Big Tech’s breakneck race to drive engagement—and profits—at all costs fractured the world, and is “an essential book for our times” (Ezra Klein). We... Read more

Native American DNA

Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science

By: Kim TallBear
Narrated by: Donna Postel
Length: 10 hours 9 minutes

In Native American DNA, Kim TallBear shows how DNA testing is a powerful—and problematic—scientific process that is useful in determining close biological relatives. But tribal membership is a legal category that has developed in dependence on certain social understandings and historical contexts, a set of concepts that entangles genetic... Read more

The Future Is Analog

How to Create a More Human World

By: David Sax
Narrated by: David Sax
Length: 10 hours 4 minutes

The beloved author of The Revenge of Analog lays out a case for a human future--not the false technological utopia we've been living.

For years, consumers have been promised a simple, carefree digital future. We could live, work, learn, and play from the comforts of our homes, and have whatever we desire brought to our door with the flick of a... Read more

A Hacker's Mind

How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend them Back

By: Bruce Schneier
Narrated by: Dan John Miller
Length: 8 hours 2 minutes

It’s not just computers—hacking is everywhere.
A hack is any means of subverting a system’s rules in unintended ways. The tax code isn’t computer code, but a series of complex formulas. It has vulnerabilities; we call them “loopholes.” We call exploits “tax avoidance strategies.” And there is an entire industry of “black hat” hackers
intent on... Read more

The Code Breaker

Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

By: Walter Isaacson
Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
Length: 16 hours 4 minutes

A 2022 Audie Award Finalist

A Best Book of 2021 by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Time, and The Washington Post

The bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs returns with a “compelling” (The Washington Post) account of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend... Read more

The Founders

The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

By: Jimmy Soni
Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
Length: 18 hours 25 minutes

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2022 BY THE NEW YORKER
National Bestseller * New York Times Editors’ Choice * Financial Times “Books to Read in 2022”
A SABEW BEST IN BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS FINALIST

“A gripping account of PayPal’s origins and a vivid portrait of the geeks and contrarians who made its meteoric rise possible” (The Wall Street Journal)—including... Read more

Chip War

The Quest to Dominate the World's Most Critical Technology

By: Chris Miller
Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
Length: 12 hours 37 minutes

The Financial Times Business Book of the Year, this epic account of the decades-long battle to control one of the world’s most critical resources—microchip technology—with the United States and China increasingly in fierce competition is “pulse quickening…a nonfiction thriller” (The New York Times).

You may be surprised to learn that microchips... Read more

Brief Answers to the Big Questions

By: Stephen Hawking
Narrated by: Ben Whishaw, Garrick Hagon & Lucy Hawking
Length: 4 hours 51 minutes

“In his last message to the people of Earth, the late Stephen Hawking uses his prodigious intelligence and signature wit to explore the biggest questions we have. As A Brief History of Time painted a picture of the past, Brief Answers to Big Questions projects into the future. Told in an accessible and insightful way, Hawking’s farewell is a... Read more

App Kid

How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream

By: Michael Sayman
Narrated by: Michael Sayman
Length: 10 hours 39 minutes

An inspiring and deeply personal coming of age memoir from one of Silicon Valley’s youngest entrepreneurs—a second-generation Latino immigrant who taught himself how to code as a thirteen-year-old and went on to claim his share of the American dream.

As his parents watched their restaurant business collapse in the wake of the Great Recession,... Read more

Work Pray Code

When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley

By: Carolyn Chen
Narrated by: Jennifer Lim
Length: 9 hours 36 minutes

This audiobook narrated by Jennifer Lim explores how tech giants are reshaping spirituality to serve their religion of peak productivity

Silicon Valley is known for its lavish perks, intense work culture, and spiritual gurus. Work Pray Code explores how tech companies are bringing religion into the workplace in ways that are replacing traditional... Read more