Audible Books
Buy Now...
Checking the content of many hard disks will reveal numerous multimedia files. Generally these files will be of the music or video variety. At some point in time the music files will be transferred to an appropriate mobile device whether that is an iPod, Zen Touch or whatever your choice of MP3 player may be. However music is not the only type of media that can be stored and played on such devices especially if Audible has its way.
Audible is an Internet on-line service that provides the facility to download audio versions of books. The company has been operating in America for the past eight years and has just launched its UK Website. At present the company has built up a stock of more than 40,000 hours of audio covering more than 10,000 titles. Whatever your tastes in literature, Audible feels it has it covered with its range of fiction, comedy, self-help, drama, radio programmes plus audio editions of newspapers and magazines available on subscription. Once downloaded to the hard disk, the items remain yours to keep and can be transferred to your MP3 player so that you can listen to your favourite titles where ever you are.
Audible offers its service on a monthly subscription basis. The standard version, priced at £9.49 a month, allows for one free audio title and one publication subscription per month. Additional titles can be purchased as required. There is also a second variety of subscription. This brings two free audio books per month and will cost £14.99 per month. Anybody committing to a years subscription will be rewarded with a free Apple iPod Shuffle (a saving of around £68) for playing the downloaded content.
Once signed up to the Audible service (www.audible.co.uk), you can browse for favourite subjects. Searches can be carried out using criteria such as title, author, category, keyword or narrator. A brief synopsis is provided for each title and generally there will be a choice of versions depending upon audio quality and size of download. Audio samples, of 15-minute duration, will be available so that titles can be checked out before making a decision to purchase.
As mentioned earlier, downloaded files are yours to keep. There will be no expiration date or limit on the number of times a title can be played. If, as can sometimes happen, a download crashes when attempting to burn a title to CD then the download can be repeated without any penalty. I am not too sure what would happen if you had two successive crashes maybe it would be time to check your equipment and hope Audible would make allowances for your circumstances.
Having checking the site, I did come across one problem when attempting to use the audio sample facility. My system was set to use MusicMatch, rather than Windows Media Player which incidentally was on my system, as the default MP3 application. As a result the audio sample stream failed to connect. Once I had removed the MP3 option from MusicMatch, Media Player was able to take over and host the sample. With broadband, the streaming audio was fine but I would hesitate to use this feature or download any titles using a dial-up connection.
| add to del.icio.us | Digg this review |
| StumbleUpon | |
!!
