Week 9: # 22 Downloadable Media

First I took the Overdrive tour. The narrator’s voice seemed to be designed to put the listener to sleep, and the tour was divided into 16 small pieces with LONG pauses in between. However, the information was helpful. Then I went to Overdrive and searched the music. Besides the obvious issue that the categories are not high-demand ones, the other negative thing was that the keyword searches don’t work. When I looked at the recent additions, there was a Christmas choral music album there, but when I searched for Christmas music, the choral album didn’t show up. When I looked at the recent additions, I also saw a few albums of Indian music, but when I searched for India, nothing showed up.

Then I looked at LibriVox and Wowio. LibriVox has 2 obvious disadvantages compared to Overdrive: one is that the recordings are made by volunteers, not professionals, and the other is that it only has books that are in the public domain (meaning nothing anywhere near current). When I looked at the Wowio mystery selections, they were either really old (e.g., Arthur Conan Doyle & Edgar Allan Poe, meaning probably public domain) or authors I’d never heard of. When I looked at the computer and internet selections, some were current, most were books I’d never heard of, and most were publishers I’d never heard of, EXCEPT there were some from Oxford University Press dated 2000 and 2005.

Bottom line, all three looked easy to use, and Overdrive had a more current and MUCH BETTER selection of audiobooks than LibriVox and a much better selection of ebooks than Wowio.