All good stuff!!

One of the most irritating things that Audible does is to break books into multiple parts. Audible claims that this is to make the download faster even though there is no good reason to suspect that download times would be any different. In the age of broadband communication there is no good reason why most of us should care about the download speed. Furthermore and most irritating is the fact that separate parts of a book are created as independent items. There is no statement at the beginning of a part backed “ this is the start of part four of the six of War and Peace” which would allow the user to know which of several parts on his player had been selected. The problem is especially acute because Audible’s software has no provision to place parts on your player in any specific order. The only way to determine which part of a book you are listening to is to purchase a player with a video screen and then look at the name as it scrolls across something like this: Master …… and … Commander … Patrick …. O’Brien’s ….. Saga … of … Sea … Advanture ….. ( Unabridged) ….. Part 3. Note in the above the only really interesting piece of information is the part number which is at the very end.

Several simple solutions present themselves. First, offer the user the ability to eliminate parts and download the entire book. Second, allow the user to a single usable section before placing the book on his player. A third and simple possibility is to clearly mark the parts both by stating at the beginning of each part that this is part 2 of 4 of a particular book and by starting the name of each part with the part number which is after all the most critical piece of information.

Another irritation is that while Audible has altered their site to remember which of four speeds a user might desire, they choose this purely on the basis of the best sound for the users to player. Some users are less interested in the quality of the sound than any amount of data that can be placed on a player. They are is no way for a user to specify his preference for a specific format, say one with a higher data density.

Of course, a major irritation is that although I have been fairly continuously a member of audible in some capacity they keep changing the conditions and price for their subscription and have thus failed to get me to continuously subscribe. Every time I read renew and see that the subscription that I had when I first enrolled back 1996 is no longer available I look at Audible’s competition.

But mine hasn’t failed.

Yet.

Cheers, Andrew