Listening To Audio Books

As everyone who reads this blog knows, I am a regular viewer/listener of Leo LaPorte's TWIT podcast, & others on his site. he makes money through advertising, & has deals for his fans. One of his advertisers is Audible, the audiobook website/software owned by Amazon. The deal is 2 free audiobooks using a special TWIT code. It's for 2 books & you can then cancel & not pay anything!

So after thinking about this for awhile, I decided to try it out. You have to download the download manager & what is called the Audible Manager, which is the player. You can put them on iTunes, but I hadn't done that to begin with.

First of all, you find a book to get. Naturally I chose the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. It's a 600 page book that comes out to 25 hours. They make it a little simpler by cutting it up into 3 parts. Each is around 8 hours, & the total size is about 300 mb. Not too bad. Took about 15 minutes to download.

Then, I swear, it took me a half an hour to figure out how to listen. There is no way to listen through the website. You need the manager. Finally I found the shortcut on my desktop & voila!

I don't think the reader is that good, but it's an easy way to read a book. I've already listen to over 2 hours today. I don't know how many pages that is, but after an opening that covers his adoption, his grammar school & high school years, his meeting with Woz, & traveling around India, I'm now getting into the time about when Apple was founded.

Since the first section isn't in iTunes, I can't put it on my iPod, but the 2nd & 3rd parts can. So I can listen that way. I also can get a second book. What do I go with? Keith Richards bio? Something fiction? History? I will look through the list, & then try to remember to cancel, unless I want to get more books. that could happen. Who knows.

I still say, Audible could make it easier to use. I had trouble figuring out the system. Especially transferring to iTunes. It was saying I couldn't, but the later sections do show up under books in iTunes, so something must have been fixed. The regular cost for the platinum plan is $25 a month, which includes 2 credits, which generally means 2 books. Not that bad, especially since the Jobs book is $35.