#22 audiobooks

Lesson - for the purposes of this exercise (if you don't have cable but are stuck with adsl) choose sonnets or other short items to download.
I ended up choosing Shelley's Ode to the West Wind which still took a while to download.

Once highspeed broadband becomes a reality, free audio downloads will take off; books on tape are already on the way out, books on CD are giving way to books in MP3 format and suppliers of our audio books are offering them (from December 2007) as downloads - for a fee. Before we cut out the middleman (local suppliers) remember that they publish local authors and use local readers (no American accents).

This is an area where we need to get on board. Overseas and some local libraries have been offering downloads for sometime - perhaps the Council could fund a study tour for staff (overseas of course, not to Yarra Plenty) for interested staff.

I think on-line demonstrations such as http://www.overdrive.com/products/dlr/demos/salesdemo.htm would be a good starting point to getting strategic partners interested in funding this next step in collection development. Because of the obvious benefit not only to the print handicapped, but those who are unable to hold a traditional book because of arthritis or other handicap, we could look for grants in the disability area to fund this expansion of our collection. Others have been there before us - let's not reinvent the wheel but look at what others around us are doing.