Hi Josh,
You'd probably like http://www.emusic.com. Their back catalog is week
sauce because they only started last august, but they are getting good
at adding new releases and they are pushing between 2 and 300 new
editions per month. Book credits cost about $10 each on a monthly
plan. two books for $19.98 or some such.
Emusic has a download manager that grabs all the files of any given
book. This app works on both mac and windows, although the windows
edition has a huge pile of features I never use, lol.
The audio quality is 64 kbps, as opposed to the normal 32 kbps of
audible, and the files are non drm mp3. Several publishers including
randomhouse are moving away from audible and using non-drm-
distrobution now. I had a link to a random house digital download
senter but I lost it in an email disaster. I'll see if I can get it
back for you, but it would sertainly compete with audible for back
catalog selection. The audiopublishers association list was hopping
last week because it turns out the publisher that carries michael
conoly and the brand new stephen king book canned audible last year,
so now those new releases are both up on emusic and not on audible.
Podiobooks is doing a fantastic job filling in the gaps between
rollovers in my emusic subscription. I just read daughter of the sun,
which was fine but nothing to be praised to the skys, and now I'm
working on the seventh sun trilogy. I always wanted to read these,
but I wanted to wait til the whole trilogy was finished so I could
polish them off one after the other. It's been great so far.
I've been reading the Lois M Bujold books from blackstone on Emusic,
and I've been working through a very fascinating thing on the ethics
of geneticly designing our children. Seems kind'a relevant and good
food for thought. Reader is pretty engaging as well. I had some
vague hope that the bioethics proff who wrote the book would turn out
to be a "Kill the mutents", or "Build every one exactly the same",
type of raving loonatic, but so far he seems pretty innocuous.
Best,
Erik
erik burggraaf
Certified Technician
Assistive Computing LTD Support and training
Sales department: 888-828-2445
Support and Training: 888-255-5194
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Website coming soon
On 19-May-08, at 7:16 PM, Josh de Lioncourt wrote:
I actually like Audible quite a lot. Never had problems with them
for any of my MP3 players. Mostly I use Audible with my iPod. The
quality of the books is good, and while I'm not a fan of DRM either,
it is a reality we have to deal with. If you can name a service
that has anywhere close to the selection of Audible for audio books
to download DRM free, I'm all ears. You say there are better ones
out there. Let's here them? And Podio books don't cut it. They're
great for what they are, but I want to read the latest Stephen King
or Terry Brooks. For the very reasonable cost of Audible, I can
live with the DRM. Plus, you can burn books to CD if you really
need to axe the DRM badly enough. Right now i get two audio boo
credits per month for $21.95. That's less than half the cost of
most audio books on CD.
Josh de Lioncourt
Twitter: http://twitter.com/Lioncourt
Mac-cessibility Site: http://www.Lioncourt.com
...my other mail provider is an owl...
On 19 May, 2008, at 7:13 PM, erik burggraaf wrote:
Laughs, Fwow darcy. I'm startin to feel like a great big winer
here, but let me dispatch all this with a couple of short rejoinders.
I don't use audible. Never have, probably never will. It's a
terrible system and there are much better download services out
there. Amazon just bought audible out, so there is hope on the
horizon, but audible as it stands sounds terrible, and comes locked
down against all of my mp3 players, for my two major complaints.
In vlc, I can press command shift O, and hit enter on a folder
which has my book in it, and the files in that folder will play in
the right order. No fuss, no muss It also has a jump to time
function built in so no need to install the add on, although the
script from Tim's site does look quite nifty. I'm sure I can make
smart play lists if I had to, but I do... Not... Need, to make
smart play lists. That's just baggage.
Best,
Erik
erik burggraaf
Certified Technician
Assistive Computing LTD Support and training
Sales department: 888-828-2445
Support and Training: 888-255-5194
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Website coming soon
