Overdrive Digital Audio Books
February 26, 2004
Check out this article on Overdrive offering digital audio books in WMA format. Downloadable, Windows Media, what more could a girl ask? I know that the California Califa Consortia’s e-book committee (which I am on, incidentally) is considering jumping on board with Overdrive. This WMA option makes it all the more appealing. Ooh, downloadable & accessible. Mmmmmmmm…..
February 26th, 2004 at 3:15 pm
Why does the WMA option make it all the more appealing? None of my devices work with WMA, it can be a very difficult format to work with, and it’s not cross-platform.
February 26th, 2004 at 3:48 pm
You’re absoltely right, Miss Shifted Librarian. It’s not cross-platform. But, as Microsoft has clearly taken over the world, whether we wanted them to or not, I think it’s a more accessible format than, say, a .au or a . aiff. Granted, a .wav would have been better, but I’ll take what I can get. And all my devices work with .wma. But then again, they’re all Windows-related. What devices do you have that don’t read .wma files? I-pod, I’m just taking a guess?
November 9th, 2004 at 1:23 pm
I wouldn’t say that Microsoft has taken over the world. The iPod has a 90%+ market share in hard drive based MP3 players and a 60% plus market share of all MP3 players (including those flash based devices).
I think that the market still may be a little young. Unless Overdrive is willing to reformat your content if a new DRM standard is adopted, I might wait. Also the Overdrive content does NOT include Recorded Books material (the red and white covers), who have the rights to lots of popular titles and authors.
For DRM to work, we need a standard this is truly cross platform and not backed by only one or two companies. Hopefully the industry will be able to work with each other, consumers and libraries to come up with something that really works.