News story on a site, www.audible.com that downloads audible books
in a digital format. The technology is poor, but any book in audible
form could be downloaded by any web purveyer (including AMZN).
Saves shipping and packaging costs:
5/5/98 N.Y. Times News Serv. (Page Number Unavailable Online)
1998 WL-NYT 9812402201
New York Times News Service
c. 1998 New York Times Company
Tuesday, May 5, 1998
The Science Times: Gadgeteers Now Can Listen To The Web While Jogging,
But There's A Price
By STEPHEN MANES
If you are willing to pay a premium up front and put up with plenty of
annoyance in exchange for bargain prices on spoken-word programming, the
digital world has a gadget for you. The Audible Player is a pocket-sized 3.5-
ounce plastic device shaped like a child's mitten without the thumb. It costs
about $200 and is designed to play audio books and other programs that you buy
and download in digital form from the Web.
In other words, it is a lot like a standard Walkman-style cassette or CD
player, except that the Walkman is cheaper, has high enough fidelity for music
as well as words, takes just seconds to swap material, plays in stereo, runs
quite awhile on standard batteries and does not require Windows 95 or NT. But
the Audible Player weighs less and has fewer moving parts.
The Audible Player, made by Audible Inc. of Wayne, N.J., comes with
headphones, a carrying pouch, an adapter that slips into a standard cassette
player and a cradle, which must be connected to AC power and a serial port to
transfer data from a computer to the device. An accompanying CD-ROM supplies
the requisite plumbing software as well as several hours of audio programming,
including poetry by Robert Frost, humor by Dave Barry and selections from Frank
Herbert's "Dune," The Harvard Business Review and Car Talk.
Those trial programs are also available free at www.audible.com in exchange
for information about yourself. You do not need the stand-alone player to
listen to this or any of Audible's other programming; player software that
works on Windows 95 and NT computers is free for the downloading.
The site offers more than 4,000 programs, from Sue Grafton's "A is for Alibi"
to Zora Neal Hurston's stories, at prices as low as 95 cents for some short
subjects and as much as $12.95 for a few business titles. Because Audible
delivers digital bits rather than a physical package, Frank McCourt's 4 1/2-
hour abridg-ment of "Angela's Ashes" costs just $8.95; the same reading on CD-
ROM from Amazon.com goes for $21 plus shipping. An unabridged version of George
Orwell's "Animal Farm" costs $6.95 from Audible; at Amazon, the cassette is
$11.87 plus shipping.
These bargains have their drawbacks. Audio clips played directly on my 90
megahertz Pentium machine stammered to the point of uselessness whenever other
programs were doing anything of consequence; things worked without a hitch on a
400 megahertz machine, so the cutoff point presumably lies between. Even at its
best, though, Audible's compression scheme reduces audio quality to the point
where some "programs with substantial musical portions are currently
unavailable."
Buying programs over the Web is simple enough, but downloading can easily
take half an hour for a 4-megabyte, 2-hour program, which is as much as the
player can hold. And the site needs work. When I tried downloading the 2-hour
April 3 edition of National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation Science Friday"
for $2.95, the excerpt I received was only an hour long and the wrong show.
Programs in that series are available free at NPR's site anyhow.
The player has a volume knob plus five buttons that serve multiple functions
and take getting used to. The buttons let you jump from section to section of a
program, bookmark favorite passages and skip forward or backward seconds or
minutes at a time. But you cannot sample the audio at fast forward, and aside
from an LED that flashes puzzling colored patterns, all feedback is audible.
That means you cannot really tell where you are in a program, and you cannot
tell by looking what programs are stored in the device. The unit cries out for
an alphanumeric display.
For cars and other places where more than one person might want to listen,
the player can transmit an FM radio signal that can be picked up by a standard
radio. First you tune the radio to an unused channel, which is not always easy
in urban areas. Then you set the player to generate a steady tone, slowly turn
an unmarked dial on the back until you hear the tone through the radio
speakers, and switch to programming from the device.
Getting all that to work is neither easy nor worth the bother, because the
signal tends to break up at the slightest provocation. I finally gave up and
switched to the cassette-player adapter. It did not deliver particularly good
sound, but at least it worked. Air travelers take note: According to the
manual, the player's FM radiation makes it a potential navigational hazard if
it is turned on while the headphones are unplugged.
Because the unit lacks removable memory and can hold only about two hours of
content, you must return it to the cradle often for refills. Uploads from the
computer take about 10 minutes and are usually smart enough to avoid erasing
what you have not listened to already. But recharging the battery takes 60 to
90 minutes. A full charge is supposed to last at least three hours, but not
necessarily long enough for two full programs. An extra battery costs $25 and
can be recharged separately in a well on the back of the cradle.
The device can also accept a downloadable format called Mobile RealAudio, not
to be confused with the popular standard RealAudio. It may conceivably catch
on, but only one site, www.dailybriefing.com, offers programming that uses it.
The player is hardly a work of art. The volume control on the one I tried
moved jerkily, and the case nearly came apart when I inadvertently inserted the
battery the wrong way. The button on the cradle does not match the one that
appears in on-screen instructional messages, and tends to make the cradle slide
across the desk whenever you push it. Though there is a 30-day unconditional
refund policy, the warranty against defects lasts just 90 days.
The Internet will undoubtedly be a major conduit for audio programming in the
coming years, and the Audible Player is probably worthy of a minor footnote in
the annals of Internet commerce despite its many limitations. But the next
Walkman this is not.
23:21 EDT MAY 4, 1998
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NEWS SUBJECT: New York Times News Service; New Products & Services;
Science & Technology (NYTM PDT SCN)
Word Count: 1029
5/5/98 NYT (No Page)
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