Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Thing 18: Audiobooks

In my opinion Farrell's article summed up the whole audiobook experience quite well. A bit confusing, often frustrating, and very, very popular.

I love audiobooks, and jumped right into Overdrive when the VCCS first got the service. My initial experience was very much like that depicted in "Webcomic Takes on Audiobook DRM" - I spent a several hours downloading and updating various players and files before I finally got it to work at home. Since then it's been great, at home. At work it's a different story. When we first got Overdrive I was able to download the media player just a couple days before the latest draconian security protcols were put in place. I used it for quite happily until a few months ago when I received a new computer (a necessary evil, the old one had smoke coming out the back). Since then the multiple layers of security and firewalls have made it impossible to use. So what I do now is download at home, transfer to my Sansa recorder, and then bring that into work. And I probably ought to note that I only listed to audiobooks at work when I am engaged in those most tedious of tasks that would put me to sleep otherwise.

Students and faculty also seem to love Overdrive. We have a modest collection of audiobooks on CD, cassette, and Playaway, and whenever someone checks out one of those we make it a point to show them the Overdrive links on the webpage. The universal response is some variation of "OMG - this is great! And it's FREE? Wow."

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