Thursday, September 27, 2007

Week Nine : Thing 22

Traveling long distances everyday to get to work and back home, I devour (if ears can devour) audiobooks. I would go absolutely crazy without them and in fact go into some type of withdrawal if a book ends while I'm driving and I don't immediately have a replacement. A serious "jones" that now even listening to NPR can quench. So, yes audiobooks are high on my list. As rapid as my interest (they are exclusively my highest check-out item) I have never taken to downloading audiobooks. At first I thought great but they are such a hassle and I have such weird tastes in books that I could rarely find anything that I wanted to read. I guess I am one of those rare individuals that don't read Steel, Grisham, Clark, Sparks or Patterson. I also don't own a MP3 player and didn't see the point of downloading them to CDs so that I can then play them in my car and then have absolutely no use for them again. Until it's easier with more choices I don't think that downloadables will last much longer. But, Project Gutenberg is a different story. I have long been a fan and it's been the rescuer of many a patron request that needed a copy of a classic and needed it now because their whole class was reading it and our last copy had just been checked out. For me, Project Gutenberg exemplifies the great joy of the Internet for me personally as a librarian.

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