Going Digital for Free

Many aspects of our lives have been going digital over the past few years. A typical knee-jerk response to a question is to simply Google it.  I consider Google an appliance for my brain given how often I use it in this way. The majority of people now listen to music in the form of MP3s using an iPod, iPhone, or some other personal audio device. Many also watch digital movies on their computer screens or increasingly on their TV screens too. News is increasingly consumed in digital form via websites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or podcasts. Books are now often read on dedicated devices such as a Kindle or directly on devices like iPhones and iPads and alternatively listened to as audio books in the way that music is listened to. 

I'm an early adopter of most things digital and have consumed content almost exclusively in digital form for the past few years. I've been paying for much of this digital content though whether through iTunes for music and movies, audible.com for audio books, and amazon.com for eBooks. I was reflecting the other day on the fact that I used to borrow books, music, and movies from the public library, the physical versions of these things. I thought it was an amazing tax-supported way of simply borrowing media for the time period you needed it. I remember checking periodically with the library to see if they were moving into the digital world and was routinely disappointed to learn that they weren't. In fact, I found it extremely frustrating that I couldn't even access the online catalog because all the computers were being used by people accessing their email!

You can imagine my delight when I recently checked with my public library website and found that they now provide digital media and the ability to download and transfer it directly to your media device (an iPhone in my case). The media stays on your device for the loan period and automatically disappears after that leaving you extra space on your device. They offer music, movies, ebooks, and audio books. Since finding this new free resource about a couple of weeks ago, I've already listened to four audio books. I'd recommend that you check out your local public library website to see if yours has digital content for download as well.  

Comments

[Lesley Kelly]

I've been reading books on electronic devices for over 10 years now. It started when I was going on a vacation and needed reading material that wouldn't take up much space or weight in my luggage. My first device was a Handspring Prism. When that broke after 6 years I was stuck on my laptop for a few months until I got my iPod Touch. That opened up the world of podcasts for me, and now I'm addicted to audio input. So just 3 weeks ago I went to my local public library to check out their audio book collection on CD. I have had one dud (really...where do they get some of these narrators??) and one exceptionally well read book. The problem I had was that I could only listen on a CD player, and the only one that I have that is convenient to use, is in my car (all our home music - all 30,000 tunes - is on a server and is accessed via iPods, iPads, and laptops around the house)! And when I stopped listening, I couldn't set a bookmark to go directly back to where I left off. And I couldn't flip forward or back fast. So the delivery mechanism for books on CD has some serious usability issues. So while I'm looking forward to more exploration of this particular media, I don't think it's going to be a major player in my information consumption. Also, my life is far too crazy to have to worry about when things are due back (and finding them in my house when I have to take them back!). Unfortunately, my library is still one of the woefully underfunded ones, and I think it's going to be a while before they have the system that you described Karel, where you get the media onto your iPod and it then disappears after the due date. But when they DO get that in place -- no returns to worry about, and full listening control -- oh yeah, I'm definitely going to enjoy it!