Wow, we’ve reached the penultimate post here on Eleanor’s 23 Things! Only one more post to go on my journey to 2.0 success. Today’s post is about ListenNJ, a totally cool service (free to library card holders) for downloading audio books. Obviously, the lack of support for iPods is a problem but I trust ListenNJ when they say they’re working on it. I downloaded “A Tale Of Two Cities”, one of my favorite classics. I liked that many of the classics are always checked in and always available. We get a lot of students asking for recordings of the books they’re assigned to read for school, since some students learn better listening than reading. It’s nice to see there’s a resource where we might be able to serve their needs in times when we don’t have the audio books checked in (since no student ever seems to ask for the books well ahead of when the assignment is due, right?). The only two things I could see being potential stumbling blocks for new users are:
1. I had a spot of trouble figuring out that I needed to hit “Add To Cart”. For some reason, the light gray text completely receeded and so I spent about 5 seconds freaking out that I couldn’t add the book. I think putting “Add To Cart” by the title might have made it easier.
2. I did have trouble installing the software. Obviously, that only needs to be done once, so it’s not something that would be a constant problem.
Other than that, this seems like a really terrific service! I liked that they made it really clear what the listening and saving rights are for each specific title.
I can’t wait to download books to listen to in the background when I while away time playing MarioKart on my brand new Wii!
