Free Overdrive audiobooks: Tips for libraries—and their users
By Jeff Scott, Director of the City of Casa Grande Public Library in Arizona
Moderator: Welcome to our latest contributor, Jeff Scott, library director in Casa Grande, Arizona! His bio is at the end. An aside: We’re also eager to run balanced write-ups of library e-offerings from companies besides Overdrive. - D.R.
Find free audiobooks on the Web. Libraries can use hooks like this to help advertise their downloads of audiobooks, e-books, movies, and music.
Some libraries team up in consortia to have better selection. The Greater Phoenix Digital Library in Phoenix, Arizona, is among the bigger ones and is an example of what Overdrive-style services can provide.
The allure of audio
Audio books are the most popular items for download. Many libraries with less buying power will purchase the Overdrive service with audiobooks only. Audiobooks are popular because they are the easiest and most ubiquitous of formats—easier to use in most cases than e-books, which have far more problems with clashing formats.
Most people have an MP3 player or something similar to use. The availability of titles is quite amazing. Go over to the Phoenix site and click on Audiobooks, click on Browse all, and you will find more than 10,500 titles available to you. Certain audiobooks are by the most popular authors or may even be pre-releases—as fresh as, yes, September 2008! So just imagine, having the ability to download the latest audio-book from the comfort of your own home whenever you wanted it! This is a great service.
The negatives: Long hold lists for hit titles and less-than-perfect searching
While the OverDrive audio books are a hit, with all those thousands of titles available, people may have to wait too long for the ones they want. Overdrive needs to provide more “Maximum Access” titles—those without a wait list. Let’s hope for a more liberal rights agreement between Overdrive and the publishing industry.
There are many great titles, but it is a sliding scale. The really great titles have only one copy, and you have to wait, the good titles have several copies, with less wait, and the OK titles have Maximum Access. You have to the game the system, very similarly to how you would game the regular library, find the books you like, place a bunch of holds—in other words, play library lottery. When you place a hold on an audiobooks, you will receive an e-mail that let’s you know when it is available. The library system will determine the length of lending time, mostly three weeks.
Finding the book you want is very difficult as well. If you know the author or the title, you are in good shape. Any mistakes in searching and you get no results. The searching system is very bad, but the emphasis seems to be more on browsing than on searching. When you roll over the e-audiobooks, you can choose the genre or subject and that is very intuitive to find what you like. I think that works quite well.
Warring gizmos
The issue of incompatible audio devices and formats, although less serious than for e-books, is another challenge. Overdrive works with most any MP3 player, but not with an iPod. The company is moving to correct this, as announced for this month’s Public Library Association annual conference. Libraries should see iPod-compatible titles coming in May. What this really means is that they will have alternative titles in an MP3 format (which means it will work with just about any player, from iPods to Zunes and beyond).
This is the part where I have a concern. As I stated, the best works available have limited availability. Therefore, even if the titles are available as mp3s, it doesn’t mean the good ones will be. I have heard this song before. Offer the compatibility, but then limit the selection. Why can’t the service offer the title, then, when you have the item “checked-out,” you can select to download the title in the format you want? More than likely, there will be titles that are offered in WMA, some that can be burned to a CD, and some that are MP3s, and none of them will be searchable. It is a step in the right direction, and maybe I am being a bit cynical, but that is my fear.
YouTube video tutorials—to help educate patrons about e-audiobooks
Libraries need to do a better job in advertising the service and explain how it works. I created a YouTube tutorials on how to download an audio-book and then how to transfer it to an mp3 player. It is quite simple, but it runs through all the steps on how to do it. Getting patrons accustomed to the software and the service is the greatest challenge. This is why Borders provides download stations for its Overdrive component. This is also why many libraries are also introducing download stations and having cheap MP3 players available at their libraries to purchase. If you are interested in utilizing this service, your best bet is to run out to Walgreens and buy a cheap MP3 player. It is practically guaranteed to work. You don’t even need that much memory on the device. A device as small as 1gigabyte or even 512MB can work for this service. My library’s plan originally was to give away mp3 players to help get patrons accustomed to Overdrive. We got a great deal on 2GB MP3 players, but we found we didn’t need that much memory. 1GB and even less is more than enough. It is funny when you think about it—availability to a great convenient service is as close as your computer and your local corner store.
Bio: Jeff Scott is the Library Director for the City of Casa Grande Public Library in Casa Grande, Arizona, and as president of the Pinal County Library Federation, a consortium of 13 public libraries, he helps guide a budget of over $3 million for the City and County Libraries. A technology advocate in a rural area, he developed the first free wireless hotspot in Pinal County and experiments with e-books and technology for the library users. You can find some of his writing at Gather No Dust, and at MCLC Tech Talk
Moderator’s DRM tip for iPod owners and those wanting to keep library audiobooks: Overdrive laudably offers a way to burn MP3s of CDs for personal use, and I love the idea—consistent with the “permanent checkout” suggestion that I’ll be discussing later this week (I had hoped to do it earlier). Overdrive says you can’t share, loan or sell burned CDs, although I’d hope that you could at least be able to pass them around to others in your household. Yes, once an audiobook is in MP3 format, you can bring it into your iPod library. But it’s far, far more of a hassle than an arrangement Jeff proposes, a pull-down menu with different formats. Meanwhile here are further tips for using Overdrive audio books and e-books in Jeff’s system and many others - D.R.
Related: eBabel horrors at the Casa Grande library—and a few solutions, my TeleBlog post—plus Jeff’s thoughts that inspired the post.
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March 28th, 2008 at 12:50 am
Remember the Librivox library of free legal Audiobooks. They are read by members of the public. I’ve enjoyed them so much that I am now reading “Clarissa Harlowe” by Richardson for them with a friend & “The Spectator By Addison & Steele on my own. Librivox.org.
March 28th, 2008 at 3:03 am
Bob, thanks for the Librivox mention. Here’s to a variety of sources for audiobooks—including those people are legally free to pass on to friends! - David