Ooo my library has ebooks and digital audio books!

I discovered on a recent trip to my library that they now are making ebooks and digital audio books available. I had stopped in to get some read materials for my vacation and there was a nice big sign advertising the ebooks and digital audio books. I copied down the URL and went home to check it out. The cool thing is that there seems to be a nice selection of different titles. The downside is that you have to have specific software installed to make the books work. The ebooks require Adobe Acrobat. No real hardship there. However, the digital audio books require users download something called “Overdrive Media Console”, which only works on the PC side. I sort of expected this after listening to an Open Stacks podcasts a while back about the Fairfax, VA public library making audio books available and patrons having the same issues. Please digital audio book vendors get a clue! I’m a Mac convert who owns an iPod and would like to listen to these things on my drive to work. Also, as other bloggers have pointed out it is elitest to not make these material available via Open Source Software/Platforms.

In my opinion, libraries are caught in the middle on this. A significant portion of their users are on the windows platform and they want audio ebooks. I’m a tech geek and can see reasons for trying it out. However, vendors aren’t making the audio ebooks accessible to all platforms. This puts the libraries in an awkward position. To resolve this libraries and librarians need to advocate for the vendors to change ASAP! Libraries should also link users to freely available audio ebooks on the web. Project Gutenberg has audio ebooks. Also there are several authors podcasting books chapters, for more on this check out Podiobooks.