Sunday, July 13, 2008

Counting Our Blessings, with a Wimper, not a Bang

I've had several "lessons" in using OverDrive. Fortunately I have early-onset Alzheimer's, so I was still able to view this exercise as someone new to the process. Like most people, after creating an account I ignored the help screens and checked out a book. Next I downloaded it without too much trouble. Then I tried to play it on Media Player 11.0, without success. Then I thought, oh yeah, maybe I need something from OverDrive. Downloaded it. Still no success. And the error screens weren't that helpful. Finally, oh yean, that update for license management. Bingo! Success in downloading Jon Stewart's America. If I get up the nerve, I will try to download it to my mp3 player, which came with 45 pages of instructions, about one page per dollar I spent on it.

Actually, the Help screen, Help videos, etc. seemed useful once I looked at them. But who has that kind of time?

I searched for some audiobooks as a test. Author searches for Ruby Mae Brown, Andrew Holleran, Edmund White, Proust, Annie Proulx, Alan Hollinghurst, and E. Lynn Harris yielded zero hits. After several keyword searches yielded equally poor results I did some checking, and found that there are fewer than 700 titles in our library's audiobook collection! But, before getting all huffy I did some checking on Amazon.com and found that lots and lots of books are not readily available in an audio format. At least we have one audiobook by Ray Bradbury, and one by Kurt Vonnegut.

I think our downloadable audio collection is best considered as a browsing collection. In browsing the nonfiction I came across Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present, by Cynthia Stokes Brown. I listened to the excerpt (which was too short) and read the synopsis ("An epic history of human civilization and of the universe that we inhabit, stretching back to the limits of what is scientifically knowable."). I might enjoy listening to this book as a relatively painless way to update my knowledge on this subject.

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