The Gordian Knot

During the Top Five Technology Trends session, Beth Degeer of Bartlesville Public Library in Oklahoma discussed the options her library is offering for MP3 audiobooks. She explained that because of the presence of employers such as ConocoPhillips in the area, the library tended to have a tech-savvy patron population, so interest was high in offering audiobooks that could be used with portable players. She summarized the four vendor offerings that her public library considered:

1. OverDrive: large service offering audiobooks, music and picture books, used by such major libraries as New York PL and Seattle PL. Degeer indicated that BPL found OverDrive prohibitively expensive for a library of their size.
2. Audible: subscription service offering not only audiobooks, but also other spoken-word content such as news and public radio programs. Degeer said that Audible’s subscription models worked very well for individual subscribers, but were not structured well for libraries; for example, there was a hard limit on the number of players that could access a given audio item.
3. NetLibrary: OCLC’s offering has about 800 audiobooks, but relatively little for children and young adults. The pricing was more accessible for her library, indicated Degeer, but all content was presented in a DRM-protected format that was incompatible with iPods. Commenters in the audience also indicated that the lack of chapter-like “tracks” or bookmarking capabilities in the NetLibrary audiobooks made it easy to lose one’s place when stopping and restarting one’s listening.
4. iTunes: Despite its fame as a Music Store, Apple actually offers a healthy selection of audiobooks through its iTunes service. This was the solution that BPL settled on: membership/subscription to the service is free, as one pays by the title; BPL purchased about $4,000 worth of audiobooks and will soon expand to music and other programming. An iTunes subscription is associated with just one computer, but there is no limit to the number of different listening devices that the content can be loaded to from that computer. Therefore, at BPL the service is not available to patrons remotely; they must come into the library, and the library staff loads the desired book onto the patron’s iPod in the library. As another option, the library has purchased five Creative Nano players that they loan to patrons who need them. It’s important to note that if a patron is carrying their own material (i.e. a selection of music) on their MP3 player, then the process of loading an audiobook onto the player from iTunes will remove the content that they had on the player and leave only the audiobook; in the same way, if the patron synchs their player with iTunes on their own computer, it will not download the audiobook onto their computer but instead load their own iTunes content onto the player, replacing the audiobook.

Degeer indicated the service caught on quickly — 200 checkouts within the first week — and has continued to be popular.