Week 11 - E-Books: Audio and Text

After three weeks of topics with which I have no person experience, now we're onto something I use almost everyday - digital audiobooks (DABs).  I listen to audiobooks before bed, when I go running, and when I walk around campus.  As a side note - audiobooks are an excellent cure for inability to sleep because they completely take your mind off whatever is stressing you. I discovered that OverDrive lets you download audiobooks to your ipod even if you're not in the actual area the library serves (ie there's no IP restriction) so I happily download from the Ohio E-book Project's large collection, http://ohdbks.lib.overdrive.com, with my hometown library card even though I'm in Wisconsin.

Since I use OverDrive audiobooks so often, I noticed some areas that have changed since the "Comparison Points and Decision Points" article by Thomas Peters in this week's reading was written.  These include:

• Collection size: According to http://www.overdrive.com, OverDrive now has 300,000 digital titles.  Granted this includes other formats such as e-books in text format, movies, and music but, nevertheless, this indicates that OverDrive has dramatically increased its collection from the 7,617 titles stated in Peters' article.
• Publishing partners and other content suppliers: The article states that OverDrive has fifty suppliers.  This has also dramatically increased since the time of this article's publication because the news for OverDrive at http://www.overdrive.com reveals that many new publishers have been added.  For example, Simon and Schuster, TantorMedia, and Penguin Group were all added in 2008.
• Single copies, owned versus leased with multiple concurrent users:  Peters states that OverDrive uses the single copies, owned model.  However, in my personal experience, I have found OverDrive to use the opposite model, leased with multiple concurrent users.  For example, the Ohio E-book Project currently has twenty copies of Twilight.  When the book was more popular, they had approximately thirty.  Consequently, it appears that OverDrive is leasing the collection to the library consortium and giving them the option to change the number of copies they lease rather than the library permanently owning copies.
• Playback options:  In my experience, very few DABs on OverDrive allow transfer to CDs.  However, in the "Comparison Points and Decision Points" article, Peters states that "OverDrive has agreements with its content suppliers that allow users of most of its audiobooks to burn the content to CDs."  He later claims that publishers are moving away from allowing CD transfer.  This prediction seems to be correct given that almost none of the audiobooks I've listen to from OverDrive allow this.

I also noticed two aspects of OverDrive that have changed since the article by Peters, Bell, and Sussman titled "An Overview of Digital Audio Books for Libraries."  These aspects are:

•  The "ipod impasse": I always listen to the audiobooks I checkout on my ipod and have not broken DRM or done anything else illegal so clearly this is an option now.  According to http://www.overdrive.com, a relatively recent agreement was reached between OverDrive and Apple in May 2009 allowing OverDrive media to be transferred to ipods.  One thing I've noticed, though, is that when DABs expire, they are not removed from my ipod.  In fact, it is somewhat difficult to remove them and requires connecting my ipod to itunes via my pc and manually deleting them.  Perhaps this is why it took so long for OverDrive and Apple to reach an agreement and also explains why a fair number of DABs do not allow transfer to ipods.
• Playback resume: The article states that "play begins back at the beginning of the book" when returning to an OverDrive audiobook after listening to other music on your MP3 player.  This is no longer the case because when I switch back to an audiobook on my ipod, I am presented with a "resume" option  that returns to the exact point where I stopped listening.

I enjoyed "Digital Accessibility for Blind and Physically Handicapped Individuals: A Panel Discussion" once I finally got it to play after 45 minutes of fighting with RealPlayer.  I thought it was interesting that the National Library Service has a copyright exception for narrating books although they need to somehow prevent the narration from being distributed to people other than the patrons they serve.  This makes a lot of sense because otherwise it might be prohibitively expensive to obtain recorded materials for distribution to the blind and physically handicapped.  Also, this occurred to me as an example of the numerous small exceptions in copyright law that Litman strongly dislikes.

Lastly, I thought an interesting point was raised in the "Think Tank on the Future of E-Books" panel discussion.  Specifically, several of the librarians were wondering how interlibrary loans would work with e-books.  Perhaps licensers will allow e-books to be printed and distributed similar to the ILL clause in many licenses for journal article databases.  However, this would be extremely inefficient and waste a lot of paper so I hope that licensers can devise a way for e-books (and journal articles for that matter) to be sent electronically that also satisfies their concern regarding the potential unauthorized distribution of the material.