i happen to be a lover of audiobooks. i listen to them in the car, on the subway, sometimes i will even listen to a good audiobook at home and knit (it has to be REALLY good to make it into my home) anyhow, there is nothing i would like more than to be able to download an audiobook from the library and then listen to it. but i cannot. why? because i am a member of team apple. i love all things technology that begin with a lower case "i". none of the companies supplying audiobooks on mp3 are mac friendly.
they all blame this on apple ... and i guess i should blame apple too, but c'mon people ... can't we all just get along?
one time in a moment of desperation i purchased an audiobook off of iTunes, but it felt SO wrong! why should i have to pay for a book?! i am a librarian!
then, we have the problem of titles. now, i think it is GREAT that the queens library provides audiobooks on mp3 for PC users (and ebooks and all that jazz). great great great. that is GOOD stuff. however, and i find this problem with all the audiobooks on mp3 no matter which vendor is being used, i think the title selection leaves much to be desired. i find it is mostly popular fiction like james patterson and robin cook, which i don't tend to read. or it will be classic literature that is no longer subject to copyright. and while i love classic literature and i encourage all to read it, i read my fill of the classics while getting my BA in english and i don't feel like reading it for pleasure now. sorry. where is the philip roth and the ian mcewan and the zadie smith?
in the end i feel that audiobooks on mp3 are a little too new and the kinks haven't been worked out yet.
for instance, why must an mp3 file be "returned"? it is a file! it is not a physical thing! i hate that we can't have multiple users accessing an mp3 audiobook. with a regular physical audiobook it is different. if i have the 10 disk set of alice sebold's "the lovely bones" (not available in mp3), no one else can have it. because i have it. it is physically impossible for someone else to posses something while i posses it. there can be no simultaneous users. unless of course some whacko comes into my car to listen to it with me ... but that would be weird.
i know they say blah blah blah copyright issues you can't have two people using the mp3 file at once because people will LOSE MONEY! oh no! ... but i think that is bad business. they are trying to hold onto something that is inevitably going to escape them. an mp3 file is not a tangible thing, there is no reason why 100 people shouldn't be allowed to access it at once. there should be no recently returned shelf for something that cannot be physically put on a shelf.
hopefully one day these problems will be solved ... apple will stop being so secretive and libraries will be able to provide digital media items to mac users. after a while i am sure more and more titles will become available. and hopefully vendors will get it together and allow multiple users to access electronic files.
but until that fabulous day ... i will continue to take audiobooks on CD out of the library then rip them into itunes so that i may listen to them on my ipod, but then forget to delete later and then when my ipod is on shuffle i will wind up listening to a random chapter from On Chesil Beach.
No comments:
Post a Comment