Give Books a Listen
Not music you have in mind? The Duo check out the audio-book landscape.
So maybe you're not so into music. But if you're a fan of audio books, say the Duo, you have a few options online.
The biggest service by far is Audible, which has been around for about eight years. In that time it's accumulated a pretty decent library--thousands of books, plus magazines, newspapers, radio programs, and even lectures, panel discussions, and TV shows. Can't live without Charlie Rose, shrugs Angela, but can't get to a TV when it's on the air near you? Subscribe. A month will cost you $13 or less.
And, of course, there are plenty of books, which run from less than $10 to about $25, depending on the title. Audible also has a deal where you can get two titles a month for $22. And, says Angela, a lot of titles were on sale during her testing. She picked up the Bill Clinton autobiography, read by the author, for $10--and the six-hour listen was easier than lifting the book.
When you buy an Audible title, you save it to your computer in one of four formats, which the Audible site describes from worse to better as "telephone-like," "AM radio," "FM radio," and "MP3-like." (That last one could also be translated, in Angela's opinion, to "CD-like.") The better the quality, the more space it takes--2MB per hour for the worst, 14.5MB per hour for the best. But you can't play this stuff on just any device. It's copy-protected, so you have to have an approved unit, which fortunately includes IPods, PCs, and a surprising range of other devices, including the Palm Treo 650 phone.
Beyond Audible, Angela turned up LibriVox, which bills itself as "acoustical liberation of books in the public domain." The project takes on mainly classic fiction in the public domain, and volunteers read the texts into their own computers to create audio books. It's a fledgling project but off to an interesting start, and the recordings are free for the download. And Steve points out yet another resource made available by your local public library--services such as Recorded Books and NetLibrary, which allow you to "check out" audio books over your Net connection with that most useful of technologies--your library card.
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