Took advantage of the fact that we don't currently have a downloadable product (we're currently in the quiet zone between the end of our NetLibrary contract and the beginning of a new OverDrive one) to try out Project Gutenberg's archive of downloadable audio.
I have to say that I'm pretty impressed with it! I have some experience with NetLibrary, and I'll soon know more than I ever wanted to know about OverDrive, I'm sure) but I found Project Gutenberg to be much easier (and quicker) to download and play than NetLibrary ever was. I might have a different opinion if I needed to transfer a file to an mp3 player, but for a quick and dirty "download and listen" here on the PC, Project Gutenberg (which I'm going to refer to as PG from here on out) was a breeze! It was so easy that I actually downloaded 2 titles - one read by a human (Call of the Wild by Jack London) and one read by a computer (Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe) - just to hear the difference! (Computer-read is a bit odd, but I imagine that I could get used to it, if that was my only option - the title I listened to sounded like Stephen Hawking's "voice".)
The only trouble I had with PG's downloadable audio was that there were multiple formats of The Call of the Wild - Ogg Vorbis Audio, Apple iTunes, mp3 and Speex - You do have to know which format you can use (for me it was mp3).
I was also pretty impressed by the PG's huge catalog - and you can limit search results (or your browse list) to computer-read audio or human-read audio. This is a fabulous resource for older material.
And the best part of all? It's free - how great is that?
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