#22 Learn about Audiobooks

Let's take a look at downloadable audiobooks. Your library system may have purchased a subscription to Overdrive or NetLibrary. To establish an account in either of these services, you must first create your acocunt through your library's website. Once you have a user name and password you can access either Overdrive or NetLibrary directly and bypass your library's site. For this discovery exercise, you merely need to familiarize yourself a bit with the structure of Overdrive site or NetLibrary site and get an idea of the types of titles you can find. Take a look around and locate a few titles of interest.

Discovery Resources:

Overdrive Digital Media Guided Tour - covers how to select and download Overdrive audiobooks.

Introduction to Netlibrary* - this 12 minute tutorial covers the downloading process for Netlibrary audiobooks using Windows Media Player 10. (be patient, it may take a few minutes to upload this for viewing)

Project Gutenberg: The Audio Books Project - Project Gutenberg makes audio eBooks available for some of the same great literature available in plain text. Listings are divided into two categories: Human-read and computer-generated audio books. These are FREE so you don't need an Overdrive or NetLibrary subscription to learn about downloadable audiobooks!

World eBook Fair: Offers eBook subscriptions for $8.95 per year, but typically has a one-month free access promotion. Check out the sponsor links to view the various eBook collections available.

Discovery Exercise:

1. Establish an Overdrive or NetLibrary account and explore the titles. If you don't have access to these, see what you can find in Project Gutenberg.
2. Create a blog post about your findings. Did you locate a title that you might want to try out and download?
   
   OPTIONAL: Try downloading a title from one of these. You don’t have to have a portable player to listen to audiobooks, you can also listen to it from a computer.