Thing # 22: E-Media Promising But Not So User-Friendly

Queens Library Digital Media has a vast, impressive array of e-books, audio books, music, and videos available for customers to download to PCs, MP3 players, PDAs,and certain e-book readers. That's presuming the user HAS one of these devices, which many of our customers don't, and files cannot be downloaded to library computers. All I have so far is a PC at home, but I like e-books so I tried downloading one audiobook to my computer. Everything seemed to be going well, although it took longer to download than I expected, but I was disappointed when I couldn't open the file. Windows claimed the file format, which I had never heard of, was incompatible. And I know bupkis about file formats.

I also hear that the MP3 format of the audiobooks cannot be downloaded to iPods because of incompatibility. But I'm not giving up. As soon as I get an MP3 player--hopefully soon--I'll try again. In the meantime I'll try and learn more about the different file formats. I've already downloaded audio books to iTunes from the Internet (all of David Sedaris--whoo-hoo!) so I'm sure it's just a minor technicality I'm missing.

One thing I like about the audio books is that while they can only be borrowed for 7days--after which they POOF! disappear--many of them can be burned to a CD or downloaded to a portable device or player. They're also available, sometimes for free and sometimes for fee, from Amazon and many other vendors and online sites.

As for e-books, I'd really rather read print materials than text on a computer screen. I feel the same way about e-book readers, although I've never tried them. I have, however, watched movies online from Netflix without a hitch, but had to download their program before I could download their movies. Amazon also has downloadable movies, but according to tech reviews they haven't been well-received because of technical problems. Like any technological advance, e-media has to go through a winnowing-out period so the kinks can be worked out and formats become more uniform. I look forward to being able to utilize these formats.