Eric Gwinn, the gadgets editor for the Chicago Tribune wrote a (slightly overly) nice and non-judgmental article about digital audiobooks from libraries. My quick read didn’t find any errors or misinformation, which seems to be a rarity when it comes to library technology issues in newspapers and magazines. The article spends a decent amount of time addressing some negative things about the digital audiobooks we offer but it never gets negative on the service:

The process of downloading a library audiobook to your computer and transferring it to a portable media player doesn’t always go smoothly. [ha!] Even if you follow the directions, files may seem to disappear. Don’t panic. Review the step-by-step instructions on your library’s Web site. [Does he mean actual library website or the website linked from the library site? Do patrons differentiate or care?]

…

You can put a “hold” on a checked-out audiobook, telling the library, “I want to check this out when it is returned,” but if you are the fourth person to place a hold, you could be waiting as long as 84 days — nearly three months! — before listening to that book.

…

Library audiobooks don’t work with Macs, iPods or iPhones. Audiobooks downloaded from libraries use copy-protection technology that Mac computers and Mac devices don’t support. This is librarians’ answer to the frequently asked question, “Why won’t this audiobook show up in my iPod?”

Big ups to Gwinn for “How to enjoy library audiobooks on the go” and spreading the word. Libraries could probably use the article as a promotion for their digital audiobook service.

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UPDATE: A few people said that the video crashed their browsers. I’ve taken it out of this post and put it on a separate page. I’ll have to sort it out. Any reports would be appreciated!
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Way back in the day at the TFML some YS librarians recorded stories, I put them online and since the site is (soon to be was, I understand), blog based, the stories were being podcast. Yay. As neat as it was to have a podcast, the interface for listening to stories online was not ideal. As you’ve likely experienced before, clicking on an mp3 takes you to a grey page with a simple controller. Not very pretty, and not good for usability.

I want to provide a better interface for listening to stories the second time I implement a “listen to stories online” program. Considering how easy it is to add artwork to audio by exporting AAC files from Garageband, I thought I’d start there.

This is fine and dandy but makes iTunes the only way to see the artwork while listening to the audio. Why? I can’t find any online tools that will let me embed .m4a files in a website. Do you know of one?

Compressor is one of the most versatile file encoding tools and I guessed that if anything could convert an .m4a file into something useful (like a QuickTime file to embed!) that would be it. It did, but with only slightly satisfactory results. Something like this will appear on the NPPL’s Click-A-Story page (yes, that’s the same name, but give me a break, the libraries are across the country). If this embedded video doesn’t appear in your RSS aggregator, you’ll have to click through:

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The offending video was here. To see it, though for some reason it might crash your browser, here it is on a seperate page.
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iTunes artwork is 300×300 pixels, but Compressor keeps turning the files into 160×160 pixels for some reason. I’ve not yet been able to find the right setting that spits out proper images. Scrolling is unsatisfactory too. I thought I’d put this out regardless as a quick proof of concept, and to see if anyone has suggestions.

Recently, Joshua M. Neff posted about his library’s Johnson County Library Online Storytime. You know, the title of their project is pretty straightforward and I like it. Another part of the project that I like and that I’m planning on replicating is having CDs of the stories for distribution. That’s a good way to get content to do more work.

I’ll be sure to let you know when the project is live and what the response is like!

The (much deserved) hype surrounding the iPhone has spread to the publishing world. HarperCollins has released 14 Books for the iPhone. This lame attempt is unlikely to finally get ebooks right (an impossible task in our highly DRMed world), and might get people excited for only a limited amount of time. I do see the iPhone as an interesting piece of the eBook puzzle, though, considering it is the first high PPI device that people are carrying around on a daily basis.

I read about this right before I read Jessamyn’s post (with comments worth reading) about Overdrive, audiobooks, and the iPod. I love her attitude about making the most of a crappy DRM situation and using the inevitable patron iPod denial as a teachable moment about free audiobooks online.

Similarly, I doubt libraries will be circing titles to patron iPhones anytime soon. Instead we can tell them about Project Gutenberg and iPhone formatted PDFs from manybooks.net.

Today Apple announced that after 5 years of selling ipods, they’ve sold 100 million on them. The ipod has dethroned Sony’s Walkman as “the fastest selling music player in history.” Poor Walkman.

I realize it isn’t 100% the fault of libraries, but it is a bit telling that libraries haven’t responded with more vigor to the ipod by attempting to integrate them into library services. If more libraries would have copied the homegrown ipod audiobook program of the South Huntington Public Library instead of throwing money at vendors for inferior (in some ways, and to be fair, better in a few ways) products, maybe this would have exerted pressure on vendors to work something out.

My hopes of ipods in libraries has been somewhat renewed with Apple and EMI’s announcement of DRM free music and Microsoft’s announcement that their floundering Zune will follow suit. Could the tide be turning? I’m not holding my breath but I’m afraid that reasonably DRMed content is the only way libraries will be a relevant digital content provider in the coming years.

I’m not going to lie, I’ve had a troublesome time accepting podcasting as the new hotness, especially for my personal information input and output. However, as a librarian who wants to meet users on their terms, I see the value in having engaging non-text content for those with different tastes. We might not have many people subscribing to our YA review podcast, but that will likely change. And for now, people listen on the web. The same will hold true about our “Click-A-Story” program from the YS department, in which the librarians will record public domain fairy tales.

The number of articles that have come out recently about podcasting in education aren’t being published (just) because of hype^1^. We’re seeing an effort to meet the information gathering/processing habits of digital natives.

Prescriptivists say that this is the breakdown of the educational system, that we’re kowtowing to people who don’t know any better, and that the sky is falling. Isn’t it funny that these naysayers (including our own M. Gorman in the below article from The Chronicle) think that the Absolute High Standard of pedagogy is very similar to the system to the one in which they were educated? I’d really like to know why the evolution of education from, say, the 1800s to the present wasn’t a bad thing. Why aren’t these people advocating the use of slide rules, no, excuse me, abaci, to teach mathematics. Or maybe just a pile or rocks. Me? I think our “Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.”^2^

Take a look at itunes.standford.edu which is an entrance into Stanford produced and branded content in the iTunes Music Store. It is a fine example of an institution not being static, but rather being user-centered, and getting great PR in the process. Not only is there content for non-Stanford people to download and enjoy, but there’s an entire private section for students and faculty.

I know that libraries have hours and hours of of stuff to which people would love to listen. Now if only we can get Apple to give us libraries.itunes.com…

^1^For example, The Net Generation Goes to College from The Chronicle of Higher Education and the front page “Missed class? Try a podcast ” from the October 20th Chicago Tribune


^2^Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants By Marc Prensky

I came home from getting my hairs cut yesterday and saw the ListenIllinois website on displayed on my monitor. After adding 2 and 2, I figured that my father-in-law, who was crashing at our place for a few days, was looking at which books are available. He has recently retired, but before he did he was an avid audiobook listener when he traveled for work. Evidently he’s listened to nearly 1,000 books on tape and CD. (!) Now that he’s traveling for fun full-time, he needs some sort of audiobook solution that doesn’t include having to return materials on time. That’s what the new 60GB iPod sitting on the desk is for. He really must trust me, leaving that thing around. I won’t be able to put any library audio eBook content on his iPod. ListenIllinois runs on authorized-only Audible compatible players. And if you’ve read any of the audio eBook conversation going on, you know that content from OverDrive and Recorded Books - soon to be integrated into ListenIllinois’ catalog - won’t work on iPods because they are Windows Media Audio files.

Ok, I know that libraries shouldn’t alienate iPod users (it is kinda sad that the state librarian of Hawaii had to apologize to iPod users) and I know that libraries
should still be circulating players and books to patrons but I don’t want to get into that discussion here.*

What interested me about all of this was his assumption about how audio ebooks from a library would work. Moments like these are insights into how people think libraries operate and are valuable.

One very simple way to manufacture these moments of insight is to listen to your users. When they ask something about the library, or have an incorrect assumption, it isn’t because they’re stupid, its because they have different expectations of the library. If one person thinks that, for instance, your public computers ought to have WordPerfect as well as Word, maybe more people feel the same way. And maybe this is because Dell, one of the top (quantity-wise) producers of PCs in the world stopped providing as many pre-installed copied of MS Office on computers, and rather includes WordPerfect (true story). Take these expectations seriously, because they just might be logical, employ the path of least resistance, or save the time of the reader.

*Okay, maybe I want to have that conversation here. Much like J.K. Rowling’s piracy-begging refusal to release a HP6 eBook (HP6 scanned, proofread, and online in 12 hours after being released) and her piracy-begging exorbitant price for a HP6 audio eBook (bootlegs HP6 audiobook available) all of this audio eBook DRM madness is going to force me to, guess what? To meet the audiobooks needs of my father-in-law, I’ll either rip books from CD to MP3, download from people who have already done this, or, if I’m really desperate, burn Overdrive content to CD, then rip to MP3.

The thing that really, really gets to me about this situation (and our OPAC situation) is how we’re pretty much forced to endure the whimsy of the industry (and deal with many institutionalized hurdles). Let’s not let this impotence lead to apathy, pretty please?

Just to see how the process would go, I decided to download an audiobook from the iTunes Music Store today and convert it into a circulable package. Why? While slightly more staff time intensive, buying audiobooks this way could be cheaper. Also there’s the whole books on mp3 issue that we’re trying to figure out. I like the program in which we’re currently participating, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t poke around, right?

Here’s how it went. I selected the title and downloaded it. I next loaded the downloaded mp3s into a playlist and burn. Normally, this wouldn’t be an issue, but it was. When burning music from a playlist, if there is more than one CD’s worth of content, the program prompts the user to cancel or have the music burn on multiple CDs. It did indeed prompt me, but then alerted me to the fact that burning across CDs wasn’t allowed with content purchased from the ITMS. It also suggested that I just burn one book section at time, which I did. These individual sections (there were three for Dress Your Family…) burned across 2 CDs each actually.* Whilst the CDs were burning, I prepared packaging for the BOCD.

I coped and pasted the artwork from the ITMS into photoshop, and printed it out. I could not, however, copy and paste the (Booklist and LJ) blurbs from the ITMS. My highlighting/copy function was disabled. At this point I said to myself, “Ha! Doesn’t the ITMS know that I’m a librarian and have special content from these library sources?!” So I surfed on over to amazon.com and copied the Booklist blurb into a document and printed it. After throwing down some chicken scratch labeling the CDs, I was done.

Here’s a gallery of the DIY ITMS Audiobook

It turned out fine with pretty much no effort. I’m sure our tech services people could make it look very professional.

Here are some numbers regarding the process:

-Cost of audiobook from the ITMS: $16.95

-Time spent downloading the (6+ hour ) audiobook from the iTunes Music Store: 9 minutes

-Number of CDs: 5

-Time to burn each CD: 3 minutes each

Let’s say that the entire thing took about 30 minutes**. Processing a BOCD takes some time, but maybe not this much. Perhaps this takes twice as long. So, how much money would this extra 15 minutes save us? Well, in this case, sadly, not too much. Amazon lists this same item for $21.75 (plus shipping), and we could buy it from our jobber for $17.59. I suspect that there are a number of issues involved with these figures. Maybe some books can only be found unabridged from, say, recorded books. Perhaps it is the case that anything to be found, unabridged, on the ITMS can also be found through our jobber or amazon. I would love to be able to save money using the ITMS, but at this point I’m not sure it’ll happen.

Other thoughts:
It would be nice to have audiobook content on a computer, ready to be burned to replace scratched CDs. I suppose this could be accomplished by ripping CDs purchased, which would be a slight reversal of the whole downloading from the ITMS process.

One advantage that our current books on mp3 program, ListenIllinois has over downloading from the ITMS and circulating on an mp3 player is an interface. Take a look at ListenIllinois’ site and you’ll find that it looks good and works well. This wouldn’t be the easist thing for a library to replicate.

The key to all of this will be sitting down to figure out if there is unabridged content on the ITMS can be downloaded for less than purchased elsewhere. It seems like the majority of their content is from Audible (as is the case with ListenIllinois), but I don’t know if content direct from them is as easy to burn onto CDs. Anyone know?

*Except for the last section, which was short.

**Note: this is a relatively short book. All of this would take longer for a longer book.

I am happy for the library in New York that’s getting tons of press for circulating books on iPod shuffles. Truly, I am, but, what the heck? Many libraries have been circing books on mp3 players for some time now. Why hasn’t any attention been given to them? We all know the answer to this: Because no other mp3 player is as desirable/known/HOTT as the iPod. For golly’s sake, when I tell people about our books on mp3 program, I have to say, “Yeah, you’ll be using the Audible Otis.”

Does anyone have any comments on the legality of this program of the South Huntington Public Library. Think they’re safe if they stay with a one paid download/one circulation model?

After the Film Discussion Group flap I received an IM from a supportive patron. I doubt she knew how excited I was to A) get some more supportive communication and B) receive that communication through IM.

During our conversation the patron mentioned some of the things that she enjoys about the library, one of which was audiobooks. I then took a moment, as I’m apt to do, to promote Listen Illinois, the books on mp3 program in which we’re participating. She liked the idea of this and told me she’d IM me later when she had put together a book basket. I placed a hold on the player for her and she IMed me shortly after.

As if this wasn’t great enough, when the player became available for her I noticed that she was online. I sent her an IM letting her know that I downloaded her items into the mp3 player, which was ready for pickup. The next day I came into the library and noticed that the mp3 player had been circulated.

Textbook!

I like posting the statistics we have on the forward thinking stuff we’re doing. My hope is that our successes illustrates the legitimacy of this type of stuff in libraries.

We’ve been circulating our MP3 players since February. They have gone out a total of 24 times, with a total of 76 books.

I am happy with these figures.