Audiobooks and the Digital Collection

It is great to have downloadable audiobooks and some audiobooks can even be burned onto a CD. However, the selection is somewhat small for avid users of audiobooks, the webpages are poorly designed, and many excerpts contain little or no material of the story or main text.

The excerpts are all two minutes in length. The excerpt for Atlas Shrugged contains no reading from the actual text of the story. We get two minutes of publication information, copyright information, length of book, number of chapters, and a reading of some of the material on the back cover of the book! This is virtually useless to someone who would naturally want to hear the quality of the writing, get a sense of the rhythm of the story, and the quality of the vocal characterizations and tonal interpretations of the reader.

11 Days in December includes actual story text, but the reader is really bad, very flat in his vocal interpretation of the text.

The Time Machine included actual story text, and had a much better vocal rendering of the text than 11 Days in December.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution included actual story text, and had a merely adequate vocal characterization of the text.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was at best mostly material not related to the text of the story itself -- unless one counts a short section which mostly is prefatory in nature as the start of the actual story.

The design of the webpage on which the books appear is very cramped and is in desperate need of redesign.

I like that audiobooks can be downloaded to mp3 players, and that some downloads can be copied onto CDs. But the smallness of the collection, the poor vocal renditions, and the poor design of the website clearly shows that the age of downloadable books is very much in its infancy in terms of collection quality -- which for audiobooks includes vocal interpretation of the text, collection quantity, and the design of the audiobook webpages.