Podcasts (and e-books): The joys and the annoyances
By Carol Jurd
Podcasts—it’s hard not to get addicted to them. All those wonderful programs from the BBC, book-readings from Librivox, music information from Naxos Music. Just download and transfer them to MP3 player and listen away. You can buy various devices to listen on your car radio, and then you can easily download to your phone.
Or can you? Could it be that podcast come with usability hassles, just as e-books do?
The audio wars
My MP3 player, a SanDisk Sansa, interfaces perfectly with Windows Media player (WMP). But WMP has no facility for downloading podcasts. ITunes has an excellent podcast downloading system, but it takes a disdainful attitude to my SanDisk, refusing to recognize it at all. Fair enough, Apple wrote the program for its iPods. I have tried Juice, several times, but it seems to have no interface with anything.
Well, I could use the RSS feed in Internet Explorer, but it simply saves the MP3 files as “123xyzblog.mp3″ or something equally unintelligible. At least iTunes saves files with names that make sense. At the moment I download in iTunes, then let WMP “find” the files on my computer, then download to the MP3 device. Mercifully, the wonderful Librivox audio book site lets me download direct and gives the audio files recognizable names, so I can bypass all of the above!
Like our e-book woes
This situation sounds very much like our e-book woes. Podcasts are free, like public domain books, so perhaps some companies that want to sell MP3 music downloads, movie downloads and books are not be interested in making life easier for us to use any free material that is available. We might all wish for devices that let us read in HTML, PDF and a handful of the most common formats, but this is just not happening to the extent it should. At least podcasts usually come in MP3 format and can be heard on any computer or portable player, despite download woes.
I do wish one of the players like Yahoo or Google would design some better software for both e-books and podcast downloading. Also an advertising opportunity lost—getting feedback on the users’ tastes must be worth something. Amazon.com certainly doesn’t let the information about my book purchases go to waste; in fact, it provides pages of “recommendations” every time I visit the site (which is quite often, as I like having the books filtered this way).
Open Culture as a guide
If you would like to explore the “Podcast” world, I would highly recommend Open Culture’s site. Open Culture lists and reviews many sites offering audio books, university lectures, language lessons and so on.
July 15th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
Wow, it’s good to get a few *sound* recommendations from TeleRead! Joking aside, those were good observations.