Download and Listen to Audiobooks
Pay for audiobooks on CD, or download free books--plus, what Steve uses to listen to books.Steve Bass
Steve Bass writes PC World's monthly "Hassle-Free PC" column and is the author of PC Annoyances, 2nd Edition: How to Fix the Most Annoying Things About Your Personal Computer, available from O'Reilly. He also writes PC World's daily Tips & Tweaks blog. Sign up to have Steve's newsletter e-mailed to you each week. Comments or questions? Send Steve e-mail.
You still read, don't you? I mean, printed words, like in books? I devour a book a week--but when I'm traveling, I enjoy listening to someone read to me. Read on for ways you can do it, too.
How I Listen
I do all my listening--music and audiobooks--on a Zen V from Creative. Pound for pound, I think it gives me more bang than a Apple's iPod or Microsoft's Zune. The sound is good and I like the small size.
The controls are easy enough to manage; and unlike most MP3 players, I can set a bookmark so I can get back to where I left off in a book. Unfortunately, setting a bookmark takes way too many steps. What I wish Creative would do (but I know it'll never happen) is add another button to the player for setting bookmarks. I'd also like a way to skip forward in specific time ranges, say, 1-, 5- and 10-minute jumps. That would come in handy when listening to podcasts.
I'm not tickled with Creative's software--I think it's kludgy, confusing, and unintuitive--so I bypass it. When I attach the Zen with the super-short USB cable that also serves to charge the player, I use Windows Media Player or plain old Windows Explorer to do my syncing. Either one works just fine.
Read Eric Dahl's in-depth review of the Zen V Plus. A 2GB Zen Plus (which has a built-in FM receiver), runs about $100. You might also want to see what people who purchased the Zen V Plus have to say.
Dig This: Andreas Gysin's site has lots of nifty Flash and other weird artsy things to experiment with. Try Sky--hold down your left mouse button and move the cursor up and down. You'll see a bar that changes from green to red, which corresponds to the speed of the clouds. (Come on, you didn't have anything else important to do today, did you?)
Audiobooks for a Fee
Like Netflix does with movies, Simply Audiobooks sends you audiobooks on CDs. Keep them for as long as you need to. Once you return one CD, you get another one. Also as with Netflix, there are no penalties or due dates, and Simply Audiobooks picks up the shipping both ways.
The book selection is big, but the service isn't cheap. A one-year subscription, for a single book at a time, costs $12 per month--that's $180 a year. If you prefer downloading one book at a time, that's available for $16 per month, or $192 a year.
As far as I'm concerned, the fee-based service is way too expensive--considering how many sites I've found that let me download and listen to books without spending a dime. Heck, even Simply Audiobooks has some public-domain books you can download for free.
Dig This: Okay, so it goes on a little too long (like by about a minute). But you have to admit this Rube Goldberg creation is fun to watch. And it's better than working, right? [Thanks, Gus.]
Free Audiobooks in the Public Domain
There are scads more free audiobooks available online.
LibriVox, which sounds like a psychotropic drug, is an open-source community committed to converting every book in the public domain into an audio recording. They have plenty, too. They're read by volunteers, but they're quite easy to listen to and they're absolutely free.
You might also want to explore Audio Books for Free and Learn Out Loud.
If you have a library card, I think the coolest way to download and listen to books is by way of many of the public libraries scattered around the nation that use the OverDrive service. Generally the loan period is 14 days. Unfortunately, not all libraries subscribe to the service; you can use the OverDrive Digital Media Locator to find those that do.
You'll need to use the OverDrive Media Console, a free program that lets you to listen to the book, burn it onto a CD, or transfer to an MP3 player.
BTW, you might want to check out AudioFile, an online magazine for those of us who enjoy audiobooks.
Read Books Online
If you prefer a book that you can read on your computer or send to your printer, check out these sites:
Quick Aside: Listen to Ira Flatow's NPR radio show, Science Friday, with an interview about a project to digitize everything on library shelves and making it available online. (Click on the media player link on the right side of the page under the "digital libraries" link.)