Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:838] Digitized Audio Books
From: Mary Harrsch (mharrsch@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU)
Date: Wed 03 Jan 2001 - 06:41:05 MET
From: "Mary Harrsch" <mharrsch@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU> Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:838] Digitized Audio Books Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2001 18:41:05 +1300
In the past I have shared with you some of my frustrations with the
publishing industry's efforts to join the digital revolution and
maintain high prices. So, I thought I'd share my excitement over a
development I just became aware of this week.
While at Comdex, I met with Microsoft folks about their Reader with
Clear Type technology and they demonstrated a free plugin for Word 2000
that will convert any document to a Reader document. So, yesterday I
finally got around to downloading it and tried it out and it worked
quite well. My only disappointment was that fonts in converted Word
documents are not sizeable like a normal Reader Document although the
font from a document with 12 pt font was easily readable. Well, in the
course of reading the Reader guidebook to check out my work I noticed a
reference to "listening" to books. Since I commute to work and listen
to books on tape every day, I was intrigued with this feature so I read
about it and learned that Random House has created a subsidiary
(http://www.audible.com ) that offers 12,000 of the Random House audio
titles as downloadable proprietary files playable on many of the popular
handheld devices including the Rio 500, 600, and 800, the Franklin
Bookman, the HP Jornada, the Casio Cassiopeia, and the Compaq Ipaq.
Furthermore the prices were significantly less than traditional
audiobooks and they have a "Light Listener" program that enables you to
buy two digital audiobooks a month (regardless of price) for $9.95 and
offer you a Rio 500 for only $49 (after $50 rebate) if you enroll for
one year (although if you don't want a player you can enroll for as
little as one month at a time). That puts the cost of the digital
audiobooks down to the less than $5 range I have always maintained was a
reasonable price for this type of product.
Audible offers the books in four formats ranging from highly compressed
format 1 (1 hr of audio =3D 2 Mb) up to high-fidelity format 4 (1 hr of
audio =3D 14.4 Mb). The only thing that users need to understand that
may be a bit confusing at first is that each device accepts only certain
formats. For example, I downloaded a format 4 book and attempted to
listen to it with my Microsoft Reader. I couldn't get the file to play
and spent time checking the Microsoft Knowledgebase to see if there was
a problem. Finally, I called Audible's tech support and learned that
Microsoft Reader only interprets format 1. I downloaded a format 1
version of the file and it played fine. I should have doublechecked the
audible website format compatibilities list. It shows that Microsoft
Reader works with only format 1 (what can I say, it was a Monday!).
However, I could play the format 4 file with Windows Media Player or
Audible's own Audible Manager.
Audible keeps a record of all purchases and maintains a link in your
personal library to enable you to download any of your files in any
format as many times as you wish, so you don't have to worry about hard
drive crashes or even long-term storage of large audio files. I joined
the Light Listener program and selected the unabridged versions of
Robert Graves' "I, Claudius" and "Claudius the God" - over 37 hours of
entertainment - for my first month's premium of $9.95 and ordered the
Rio 500 special. As a new customer they also gave me a free copy of
John Grisham's "The Bretheren" and "Left Behind" by Tim LaHaye and Jerry
B. Jenkins. (There are other new customer free titles - these were the
ones I was interested in). I eventually hope to get a pocket PC (the
Compaq IPaq certainly stomped the competition in a review I read) so I
can take advantage of other Windows CE applications but would like to
wait until they increase their memory capacity and add miniaturized hard
drives before I make the leap. Even at 32Mb, the iPaq is a bit limited
without the addition of the Flash Card jacket and that puts the device
to almost the price of many desktops. At 64 Mb, the Rio can hold even
one of my unabridged titles in its entirety and you certainly can't
complain about the special price of $49 after rebate. Kudos to Random
House!
Mary Harrsch
Network & Information Systems Manager
College of Education
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403
(541) 346-3554
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~mharrsch
Commentary Section Editor
The Technology Source
http://horizon.unc.edu/ts
A free refereed Web periodical that focuses on infusing
information technology tools in educational organizations
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