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LIBRARY FOR YOUR EARS: Download Audiobooks for Free at Local Libraries' Web Sites

Posted on: Wednesday, 25 January 2006, 06:00 CST

By Marta Salij, Detroit Free Press

Jan. 25--Now the readers of the world have a reason to get MP3 players.

Digital downloadable audiobooks.

Yes, you can fill up your player with books rather than tunes and listen on your commute or on the treadmill or while walking the dog.

And though the books are available for a fee from services such as Audible.com, the real news is that they're available at more than a dozen local libraries for free, if you have a valid library card.

Or maybe we should say available from the local libraries' Web sites: No trip to the library necessary. Go to the library Web site, put in your library card number and download the book to your home computer for three weeks. Then transfer it to any portable device that supports Windows Media Player.

When the three weeks are up, poof! The book is "returned" from your hard drive without you having to lift a finger. You can't be late, therefore you can't incur a late fine. (Though you won't be able to listen to the file after three weeks -- the playing capabilities self-destruct after that time -- you will need to delete the audiobook file from your hard drive and portable device manually.)

"They've gone over very, very well," says Mary Killian, head of adult services at the West Bloomfield Public Library. "Obviously it's a great alternative to running to the library or renting them."

Among the Michigan libraries that offer the downloads are those in Ann Arbor, Birmingham, Bloomfield Township, Canton, Farmington, Grosse Pointe, Independence Township, Northville, Novi, Plymouth, Southfield, Troy and West Bloomfield. But here's one big caveat, warns Denise Konchel, adult services librarian at Baldwin Public Library in Birmingham. The libraries' audiobooks are not compatible with the iPods from Apple. They are Windows-based only.

And, there is a bit of tech-savviness required. You'll need to download some software to your home computer to be able to receive the audiobook downloads. All the libraries offer help with that.

A little patience helps with the downloads, too. A typical 10-hour audiobook will take about 6 hours to download with CD-quality audio using a 56K dial-up modem, or 1 hour with radio-quality audio. If you have a cable modem, the downloads will take 13 minutes for CD-quality audio and 2 1/2 minutes for radio-quality audio.

Download overnight or while doing something else, Killian suggests.

"You click your mouse and it's downloading while you're packing," she says.

Audible has 10,000 titles

If you have an iPod, your one option to get downloadable audiobooks is Audible.com, which also offers audiobooks for Windows-based MP3 players. In fact, Audible.com has titles for every kind of player, including PDAs and cell phones that have MP3 players built in.

Where the libraries typically offer a couple of hundred downloadable titles, Audible.com offers about 10,000 books, says David Joseph, vice president of corporate communications for Audible.com. The service offers audio versions of magazines, study guides and newspapers, too.

The Audible.com downloads were launched in 1997, back when a download over a slow dial-up modem was a real time commitment. "Believe it or not, we had users in the early days," Joseph says.

Today, the company offers books in two ways. You can buy an individual title for about $20-$40, which is generally lower than a comparable set of audiobook CDs.

Or you can buy one of three levels of subscriptions, from $9.95 a year to $22.95 a month, which offer 30% discounts off the single-title price and various quantities of free downloads.

The new subscription services were launched in December, says Joseph, and it's too early to tell which will prove the most popular. But he says the service has more than 200,000 subscribers, many in the 35-55 age range.

And what is Joseph listening to?

" 'The History of the Roman Empire,' " he says. "I'm a real geek."

No downloads with Playaway

No MP3 player? You can download the books to your home computer or laptop and listen that way, of course.

Or you can look for the Playaway all-in-one digital audiobooks, launched in December.

All-in-one? Rather than selling digital content for a separate player, the Findaway company packages the content, player, headphones and battery in one, says Christopher Celeste, founder and president of Findaway.

Each book, in other words, is about the size of a cassette tape, with controls built in for play, rewind, fast forward, stop and even for setting bookmarks.

The Playaway audiobooks appeal to people who don't want to bother with downloading anything and who prefer their media in a form they can hold, Celeste says.

They're also popular with travelers, and Findaway is discovering that the books sell best in the 31 airport bookstores in which they're found. "Who thinks to bring their CD player?" Celeste says.

Playaway offers about three dozen titles now, including a couple of language courses, and prices start at about $35. Find out more at www.playawaydigital.com.

The company hopes to add other kinds of "preloaded content," as Celeste calls it, soon: health-care information and guided city walking tours, for example.

The Playaway titles are found at Borders, Barnes & Noble and OfficeMax stores, too.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Detroit Free Press

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Source: Detroit Free Press

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