Week 9, #22 Downloadable Media

I was impressed with the variety of material available on Overdrive. I think the selection is better for audio books than for videos. The selection will only improve as funds become available to purchase more titles. I love to read, but have never acquired the audio book habit, so haven't investigated the service before now. If I spent more time in my car, I would definitely be interested.

I was not impressed with LibriVox or Wowio. LibriVox might be fine if you need to find an old classic, but since all of their books are in the public domain, there are no currently popular authors included. I noticed that the books are read by volunteer readers and sometimes each book has multiple readers, with different chapters assigned to different readers. This could be a bit annoying if some are poor readers or have less pleasant speaking voices. I don't know what the company does to monitor the quality of the recordings. Wowio did not appear to have many interesting titles available. One of my coworkers noted that the publishers and authors seem to be mostly unknown. I also found the search feature to be very imprecise. All searches seem to be keyword searches for any of the words you list. A search for John Grisham brought up any book with either "John" or "Grisham" anywhere in the summary. There were 36 pages of results, but no books by the popular author. When I searched for "John Grisham" with the quotation marks, it found no titles, so this is a more accurate search. One nice feature was that when you move the cursor over the picture of the book a dialog balloon pops up with a blurb about the book. This makes it possible to get basic information about that title quickly. I didn't see much on the site that I was interested in pursuing.

Of the three options, our HCPL Overdrive service is clearly the best. Way to go, Harris County!