At 8:45 this morning our phone rang. It was FedEx delivering Jim’s package that I wrote about on Monday. I got a shipment notification yesterday, but wasn’t expecting it until later this week or the beginning of next week. If this is any indication of the company’s customer service, I’ll take it. Anyway though, I can talk about it now because Jim knows what it is, and in fact, has played with it.
One of the podcasts on Blind Cool Tech talked about something called Play Away audio books. The idea behind it is that there is this little device, (basically nothing more than an MP3 player), that has the audio book loaded onto it. It’s small, (smaller than the Book Port for those who have those or know the size of them), and has 8 buttons on the front. There’s a little tiny visual display, but that’s not important for the functioning of the book. It comes with a battery preinstalled and a set of ear buds which will likely never be used by either of us because we can’t stand them. The buttons allow you to play and stop (of course), navigate by chapter, rewind and fast-forward, change the volume, and change the speed. Apparently changing the speed doesn’t have any effect on the voice quality either, but I haven’t played with that yet. There is also a bookmark button, but the review I listened to indicated that the bookmark may have been pretty visual so I don’t know much about it. The nice thing too is that the buttons are really well defined. They’re not like the buttons on some newer cell phones that only take up about a quarter of the size of the phone. (Sorry for anyone using a Nokia phone that matches that description. SMILE!)
Anyway, ever since Jim was a kid he’s always liked Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. All the way through school, and even all through college pretty much, he’d get that book from the library at Christmas time and read it. He’s watched both movies also. I heard that this was one of the titles available and thought it’d be a really cool thing to get him. I went to the web site to see where the closest retail location was, only to discover that there was one possibility in our area, and it was a location I had absolutely no intention of going to. So, the other option was to purchase online. I went and looked at their titles and found Charlie, with a bonus. Not only does it have the original book, but it also contains Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. So, on this little MP3 player thing he’s got two books, read by a guy that he really likes, and it’s something that he’ll be able to keep and read any time he wants.
I said that it came with a battery all ready, but obviously you can change the battery if you need to. It’d be kind of pointless if it only worked until the battery went dead. It would sort of defeat the purpose of paying for the audio.
So, that’s it. I personally think that if this thing takes off and becomes available in more stores, it’s going to be the new wave in audio books. I mean, who wants to carry around a box of tapes or CDs when they can carry around a little thing in their pocket or purse and not have to change the tape or disk every hour or so. Kind of a no-brainer, right? Let’s hope that this thing takes off!
Snowflake said
I’ve actually seen these at an education seminar I was at a few months back…they say this sort of thing may eventually be stocked in libraries since it doesn’t require a machiene to play and may eventually go down in price (though I understand they’re not that expensive now…no more so than an audiobook anyway). Cool idea!