Week 9, Thing 22: Digital audiobooks

I am just dying for an MP3 player. I may have to break down and get one, even though I am a bad businessperson and have not landed an editing job with a new client (it's been my incentive to do that for oh, a couple years now). I would probably be more excited about Overdrive audiobooks if I had one. I've downloaded and installed the software--Joanna and I did a demonstration program for St. Mary's staff a couple of years ago when the Maryland libraries joined together to provide the service--and it's pretty easy to use and fairly easy to transfer materials to an MP3 player (not an iPod, of course). I do love the convenience of downloadable materials--for the audio and video, you need high-speed Internet access (and as the technology planning consultant we met with this week pointed out, the need for a computer with broadband access at home makes our downloadable stuff available only to reasonably wealthy people), but if you have broadband, it's pretty quick to download these large files. I like the convenience of the downloadable video too, but the unfortunate limitation of the digital collection is that hugely popular titles do not come out as digital audio, video, or ebook.

What I really love are ebooks. I download ebooks from Overdrive whenever I can (I've read pretty much anything I'd be interested in that's in the MD library collection), but since the audiobooks are so much more popular than the ebooks, we don't add many new ebooks to the collection. I download them at home and transfer them to my PDA. I like reading books on my PDA because I can do it one-handed--don't need another hand to flip the page, the little button on the front does it--and I can read them in any kind of light, because it's backlit. As more portable devices become the norm, I think we'll see more of an interest in ebooks. We'll have to see how the Sony Reader perfoms--I'm a little skeptical, because ebook-only devices have done very poorly in the past, and the trend seems to be toward multiuse devices.

Jessamyn West points out that there are iPod-friendly free public domain audiobooks available at Librivox, serialized science fiction at Podiobooks, and free poetry readings at Classic Poetry Aloud (although I like to read poetry aloud for myself, thank you). And of course at Project Gutenberg. It's been a while since I looked at Project Gutenburg--good to know that they are branching out. Great resource.