With all the commuting I have to do and messieurs Wooten and Rayburn dominating most of my reading time (with the weather being perfect and all) I figured I’d see if the what the audiobook industry has to offer the hordes of portable music player users. So while Audible.com may have a good selection and a seemingly easy UI, I’d rather have things for, ya know, free. With that in mind I’ll check out what the King County Library System has to offer…I’m hoping that whatever they have in physical form on the shelves will also be available to download, if not even more selections… I’m cautiously optimistic. I’m curious about how the licensing arrangements work between the publishers and the libraries compared to audible.com and other pay sites.
After clicking the Ebooks Audio link, I headed to the “always available audiobooks” page. There were about 30 or so offerings, a refreshingly nice mix of classics (Ray Bradbury, War and Peace), Winnie the Pooh, Ken Kesey and quite a few books turned movies (Last King of Scotland, Charlie Wilson’s War). So after downloading and installing the OverDrive media player the ~15 meg WMA files downloaded quickly to my hard drive in separate files for each hour or so of audio. There were no other options for file type…Is Microsoft sponsoring this entire library endeavor??? Aso, they are affixed with a 21 day “lending period” and the following fine print:
Digital Rights Information
| OverDrive WMA Audiobook |
| This title can be played during the lending period |
| Collaborative play of this title is not allowed |
| This title can be burned to CD during the lending period (for personal use only; no other duplication/distribution of material is permitted under the terms of the license) |
| This title can be transferred to a portable device during the lending period |
So the files play in Windows Media Player just fine and transfer just fine to my Toshiba mp3 player. I’m not sure what it would take to get these into the iTunes/IPod universe. Also, I had trouble burning the tracks onto CD using my normal non-Windows Media Player software, but of course, the WMP burner worked just fine…Again I suspect Microsoft is up to something sneaky…
So back to the library web page for more exploring beyond the 30 “always available audiobooks.” There are 436 offerings, but not a very good way to search through them. There are about 100 search categories, but most of them return no or very few matches even in categories like “classics, adult trade, scholarly.” The obvious categories like “fiction” return so many matches that scrolling through pages of 25 matches one at a time is quite tedious. You can search by ‘most popular” , but for one thing I never liked the popular kids anyway, and two, its still just 25 books per screen. A bigger gripe I have though is that each book has a limited number of “quantities” available for download and for about 1/3 or so that number is 0!
Despite the gripes, I was able to find numerous books I’d like to download and listen to so along with KEXP and Democracynow.org podcasts it seems I may be phasing out the annoying radio commercial…
