Audible does have a lot more back catalog. That is it's one and only
advantage. A store that's been around for 7 or 8 years just flat has
more stock than one that's been around for 7 or 8 months, smiles.
Especially when they use subscription models and the profit margines
are so low. It will take a while, if emusic ever does compete with
audible for pure volume of content.
I'm an old news group pirate though. 64 kbps is about the min for
me. That's about 3 minutes of audio per meg, and the average fiction
audiobook is about 10 cd's or 12 hours long. 12 gb of books would be
about 50 books or 6000 hours worth of listening. I'm doing the math
in my head here, just let me double check. Sorry, 600 hours worth of
listening. Personally, I don't need that much all at once. It's nice
to be able to cary around a 5 to 10 book fantasy series, but I listen
for production as well as content, so I prefer not to speed up the
narration or listen in stripped quality.
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 20-May-08, at 9:53 AM, Josh de Lioncourt wrote:
Audible continues to have all the Stephen King releases, including
the novella released a couple of weeks ago, so your information is
definitely not entirely accurate on that score. It still looks to
me that Audible's back catalog is the best out there. As for 32KbPS
versus 64KbPS...32 is fine with me for audio books, particularly for
what you save on disc space. I currently have 10 to 12 GB of audio
books on my iPod, so I am a bit space conscious when it comes to
audio books. I think 64KbPS is just a waste of space for spoken word.
Josh de Lioncourt
Twitter: http://twitter.com/Lioncourt
Mac-cessibility Site: http://www.Lioncourt.com
...my other mail provider is an owl...
On 20 May, 2008, at 9:38 AM, erik burggraaf wrote:
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
