Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Recommended MP3 players for downloading audiobooks from public library

Wondering about which MP3 player to purchase to make the best use of the FREE downloadable audiobooks, videos, and eBooks from your public library's website? Check out a great article by Jasmine France on CNET. I'd add two more player to the recommended list: the Creative MuVo T200 - a great little player you can throw against a wall or punish with a trip through the washer & dryer, and it will still work. Perfect for teachers or school libraries to buy & circulate to students! And I keep a low-cost SanDisk Sansa m250 in my gym bag. Check online for some great deals on the Sansa. I agree with France's recommendations - we have a Creative Zen V Plus, and it's my current favorite player for library downloads, as most public library download services require a Windows-based player. But think of it this way: for the cost of a single audiobook on CD from your local bookstore, you can buy a player that will enable you to download hundreds of favorites for free. I am looking forward to downloading titles to one of my iPods from my local library's OverDrive service soon, as more public libraries add titles without Digital Rights Management to the collection. Read this Library Journal article for more details.

Image from www.creative.com

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Warning re: Sansa m250. While my Sansa m240 worked fine for library audiobooks, my new m250 doesn't. And I see from other discussion boards that I'm not alone in this problem. What happens is that the bookmark feature and fast forward/rewind don't work after you get about 15 minutes into a long segment, which is problematic for those library audiobook segments that are often over 70 minutes long. The firmware update doesn't seem to help. If anyone has found a fix for this, please let me know!!

Mary Burkey said...

You might want to look at this post on cutting MP3 files into shorter lengths:
http://audiobooker.blogspot.com/2008/04/cut-mp3-files-into-shorter-tracks-with.html

Mary