Sunday, January 11, 2009

It’s Audible

I am a big Audible book fan. I like to mult-task by listening to my books instead of reading them. I read/listen to more than 100 books a year. I always have a real book or ebook on my Kindle that I am reading also.
Last year we (as in we, I mean the Library) subscribed to Audible.com for 24 books. We bought a download of the supplemental books that our teachers were teaching. I burned CDs of the download and put them in a CD holder that I bought from the Dollar Tree for a $1.00. (I only burn one copy, because of copyright. By only burning one copy of the download it’s just like buying a book from Barnes & Noble and placing on the shelf of your library. Yes, many people can use it, but only one at a time.) These books on CD are then placed in the Professional Library for teachers to use in class. The teacher can introduce the book by playing the first chapters of a book to get the students' interest up or to help the students with the dialect or names (as in books like the Kite Runner where names are tough).
To make the books more user friendly I took most of them home over the summer and indexed them. What I mean by that is I listen to the book, while following along in the hard-copy book. I made a chart to insert into the CD holder that tells what time each chapter begins on the CDs. This allows the teacher to play the first 3 chapters in class, assign Chapters 4 and 5 for homework and listen to Chapter 6 in class the next day. This really helps with a long book and/or reluctant readers. This also takes a really long time, because not all books break chapters at the beginning of a track.
We have had an Audible Account now for two years. They have contacted us and told us they they will not renew with us next year. I thought this might because of copyright, but they informed me they will not accept purchase orders anymore. If we continue this we will have to use a credit card.

It the teacher is not going to use the audbile book then with the teachers permission we will check it out to a student.