Reviews
Audio
Books
Books on tape. Without the tape.
There
are about five million different books in print in just the USA
these days, and your neighborhood bookstore and online stores
like Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com carry hundreds of thousands
of different titles of all description.
Before
Gutenberg invented his printing press hundreds of years ago, only
the privileged few could own books, which were painstakingly scrawled
by hand in very small numbers. The printing press enabled mass
distribution of inexpensive books and helped bring humanity out
of the dark ages. It gave the common man the ability to pick up
a book and read for pleasure or to learn new things. Today we
take books for granted. They've been with us our entire lives.
Many of us buy and collect books, just for the tangible pleasure
they bring. One of life's little pleasures is walking into a bookstore
just to browse. Even the smell of the place, all that ink on paper
is a wonderful sensory experience.
But
reading a book is something you can't always do when you want
to. For those times, an audio book is an excellent and sometimes
even better alternative, and there are tens of thousands of audio
books out there÷any kind you can imagine. Novels, non-fiction,
self-help, humor, you name it.
In
essence, Audible.com is a time management tool that lets you Îread'
while your eyes are busy, even closed, but your mind is free.
Harking back to both the aural tradition of Homer reciting his
poetry around the campfire, as well as your own childhood introduction
to text and reading through storytelling, Audible.com merges the
world's oldest, most entrenched entertainment media, the spoken
word, with the most efficient distribution channel created to
date, the Internet. It is truly an awesome service.
Nearly
100 million people drive alone to work every day, logging more
than 600 million hours each week when one's listening options
are limited, and reading is impossible. The ability to hear an
audio version of a daily, national newspaper has not existed previously
because of the logistical distribution issues involved in physical
media (tapes and CDs) and broadcast radio's geographic constraints.
Audible offers newspapers, magazines, and about 23,000 books÷nearly
70,000 hours of digital spoken word media for you to buy instantly.
New titles are added daily. No shipping charge. You don't have
to order a book on tape or CD and wait days for delivery in the
mail. It's 100% digital. This is truly instant gratification.
Of course, you don't get a fancy package or booklet with your
Audible content, but once you buy it it's yours forever.
Audible.com
book or subscription purchases come with full ownership: once
an audio title is downloaded, it is yours to keep. No expiration,
no limitations on repeated listening. The only limits are on multiple
CD burning (to account for technical or user error) and the number
of devices that can be activated to a single account.
No
title can ever goes out of stock or out of print at Audible.com.
Once a title is available at the site, it will never be taken
down from their ãvirtual shelves.ä And you can always re-download
a title you previously purchased and listened to, at no additional
cost.
Listening
to Audible audio isn't limited to the car, or your desktop or
laptop; any AudibleReady device is a ãwalkmanä that can be used
virtually anywhere, around the house, taking a walk, lounging
around, or whenever and wherever one's eyes are busy (or closed),
but one's mind is free.
Audible
addresses the common complaint ãI don't have enough time to read
as much as I want to or need to.ä Audible.com's Internet audio
service can be thought of as ãbooks on tape without the tape and
more than just books,ä or ãdownloads for the literary/information-starved
setä or simply the largest and most varied collection of spoken
word audio legally available to anyone in the English language.
To
use Audible, you download their desktop manager. This happens
automatically with your first purchase of any title. This beautifully
designed, Explorer-like software is your gateway to the books
and subscriptions you've purchased, and also includes a simple
player.
You
visit Audible.com, select the titles you want, buy them, download
them to the desktop manager and then you can do these things with
them:
-Listen
to them with the built-in player, Windows Media Player, or iTunes.
-Burn
them to Audio CDs n Load them onto your portable player - Audible
supports about 150 different players including most all Palm models,
iPods, you name it.
Audible's
files are in a proprietary ã.aaä format, not .mp3. Their software
won't convert an .aa to an .mp3 but it will burn to Audio CDs.
You can figure out the rest if you want to make .mp3 files out
of those.
Audible's
pricing structure is somewhat confusing, but there are two ways
to buy: a la carte and membership. A la carte means you buy on
a title by title basis and pay the Audible list price for each
book or program. AudibleListener membership plans are also available
for more serious listeners. Check out their site for the plans
and pricing. They also often throw specials at you like ãany book
no matter what its normal price for $9.95ä or ãJoin for a month
for 99 cents.ä Ê Ê
The
Audible Download Manager is launched when you purchase a file
download. You can buy one book or ten or a hundred, and download
multiple titles, and this client will manage all active downloads
simultaneously. Most content is available in what Audible calls
four ãaudio formatsä numbered 1-4. The lower the number, the smaller
the file, and the lower the audio quality. The higher the number,
the better it sounds, but the bigger the file is. Just like different
.mp3 encoding bit rates. Once you buy a title, you can re-download
it in any of the four formats because you own it forever. Audible
Download Manager will place the content in your preferred music
software for listening (AudibleManager, Windows Media Player or
iTunes).Ê
If
you want to burn your Audible content to CD-Rs, just install the
Roxio CD burning plug-in (free) which splits up the content of
a book on an Audio CD into approximately seven minute segments.
These breaks are to let you move/index throughout the content
without having the content exist as one enormous file on the CD,
so when a track is restarted it could be from a one of the breaks
as an index, or bookmark, as opposed to starting completely from
the beginning. They do it this way because many Audio CD players
don't have built-in ãresume.ä
Audible's
files can be anywhere from a few minutes long, to something like
Bill Clinton reading the unabridged version of his best-selling
ãMy Lifeä autobiography, which runs for over twenty hours. The
Audible players remember where you left off, and let you start
from there, or RR/FF through a file at different speeds. It's
easier to use than to explain.
I
installed Audible's Tapwave Zodiac version of the portable device
player on my Zod. Moving my purchased titles to it was easy. You
don't use Palm Desktop to sync over the titles÷the Audible Desktop
handles everything. Just cable your portable via USB, the Audible
Desktop senses the connection, then it's just drag and drop to
move books from the hard drive to the portable, either its internal
memory, or SD cards that have enough free space.
Audible.com
has an incredibly extensive online help system, FAQs, and I found
their toll-free telephone support fast and first-rate. Their phone
reps knew answers to every bonehead ãgetting startedä question
I asked them. Unlike radio, Audible lets you decide when to listen
to a favorite program (ãtime shiftingä).
Unlike
traditional audio books, there's no need to deal with a box of
cassettes that break, get out of order and have no sentimental
value after being listened to. You can bookmark favorite sections
and skip from article to article within an audio newspaper or
magazine with CD-like functionality. And every title they stock
has up to 15-minute long preview streaming audio samples and descriptions,
star ratings, user reviews, and more, so you can try before you
buy.
Audible.com
is simply a killer service. There's really nothing else out there
like it. Their selection is huge, their software is high quality
and nearly bulletproof, but don't expect to find an Audible digital
version of every book that Amazon.com stocks, or even every book
by a specific author. It has to do with who owns the rights, but
Audible constantly adds new titles. Many book authors read their
own works. You can also download a limited selection of Old Time
Radio Shows (OTR), and there are many totally free downloads,
although most of those are political speeches or broadcasts.
Because
full length book files can be many megabytes, a broadband connection
for downloading is highly recommended, but if you're stuck using
a modem, you can purchase and download one or multiple books overnight.
I
urge you to go to Audible.com and browse around. I can't convey
just how cool a service this is in a short review. If you love
books, especially audio books, you'll think you've found Nirvana.
Now
excuse me, I have to get back to listening to Al Franken shred
Bill O'Reilly. You see, I just downloaded the unabridged ten hour
version of him reading his ãLies and the Lying Liars Who Tell
Them.ä
-HHC
staff
Audible.com
Prices vary per title and subscription plan.
www.audible.com
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