Listening to books

This book reading thing, I'm really getting into it again.

Problem is, there's only so much time in a day and I rarely have more than maybe an hour a day that's not scheduled for work, cook, eat or do yoga - or travel from one activity to another. So while lazily surfing the net yesterday I had an idea about audio books. Previously I've bought some, last time from iTunes - but they are bloody expensive, even in that format... until I came across Audible.com. This is a service that you subscribe to, and based on the level you can download one or two audio books a month. Roughly calculated, I spend about 24 hours a month on the move, and two books each 10+ hours seems to be just right.

They have an offer going where I get the first month for free - so what can I lose. I've picked Neil Gaiman's American Gods (one of those books I feel like I should have read but never have) and P.D. James' Children of Men (I've often stated that dystopias are favourites - and what more can I ask but a dystopia written by the master of the pen P.D. James?).

The options for the downloads are numerous - most of the books are available in different qualities, so you can pick lower if you have less space available, or they can even be streamed to your computer if you want to listen to them that way. Files are their own proprietary format, but you can either use Audible's own player, or you can import them directly to your iTunes and from there to your iPod, or you can even burn them on a CD. All files will stay on the server up at Audible, where you can always download them again if you need to. So midst all this ruckus about copyrights and DRM it all sounds very reasonable.

I'll report back later on how it works.

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