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Audiobooks

August 31st 2007 in rant

i really really like the idea of audio books. I spend all day looking at screens, and my eyes get sore. I also love reading, and hammer though a book a week and then some. To be able to go to bed with my comically huge 1970′s headphones and listen to a book from my mp3 player (actually yes, it is an ipod, but I don’t want to fall intothe trap of all mp3 players being refered to as iPods, in much the same way as my friend Ben tries to stop all GPS navigation devices being refered to as TomToms. Annoyingly I have an iPod, and a TomTom, anyway….) would be ideal. The thing that prohibits me form buying audiobooks fall into two catagories.

1) I really like owning the actual book. My flatmate gives away his books once he’s read them, paying for them much like a service. I hang onto my book, prefering to cause the ceiling in the livingroom to sag under the weight of the shelves in my bedroom. It’s also nice to be able to make notes (on stickies!) in some of the business related texts too.

2) Audiobook are freaking expencive! I’m happy to pay £6 for a paperback, but paying 15 quid for a lit of light relief? No thank you.

What promted this mini-rant? I was reading a post over at Seth Goldin‘s blog and it rang a bell. It’s actually why I didn’t buy somehting from audioble.co.uk a few months ago. The nice thing to discover is that his books on there are not too expencive. I was about to pay £4 for the paperback version of The Dip, I might now pay £4.37 for an mp3 copy. Note: MP3! not some silly DRM slimed Windows only thing. This is good. This means I can pop it onto my phone and listen on the way to work, or play it from my headless linux audiobox. Open rights means more use!

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2 comments to...
“Audiobooks”
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Michael Walsh

Another site worth checking out – the actors they’ve got reading the books are mellifluously magnificent:

http://www.silksoundbooks.com


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coldclimate

Thanks Micheal. I’ve just bought my first text from Audioable, only to be slightly disapointed that it”s DRM’d up! Such is life :)




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I can’t beleive I didn’t think of this before. Westwood Drinking. Genius.

All thats missing are calls for “drop the bomb!”, “the big dog”, “back to the street”.

(editted because I’ve obviously offended somebody, which was never my intention, for once).

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