The Audible Experience
After hearing an Audible advertisement on This Week In Tech over and over again, as well as hearing all the good things they have to say about them, I finally decided to give it a try. What the heck, I had nothing to lose anyway. So I went to the Audible TWiT link and signed up and got a free credit for a book. Signing up is a pretty simple process and requires a credit card but they don’t charge you for the 14 day free trial, and you can cancel before that period is up and not get billed. I had a prepaid card that I used so there was no chance of them taking more money that was on the card, which happened to be about 2 bucks anyway.
I knew which book I wanted to get. Paul Thorrott talked about it during the Windows Weekly Audible ad and when I realized they had Darkly Dreaming Dexter, I thought it was about time to sign up and try out the service. The first season of the television series Dexter is based on this book so I thought it would be interesting to see the similarities and differences these two stories had.
After everything was set up, it was time for me to find the book. To my surprise, it wasn’t there. I knew it was there because I heard them talking about it on the podcast as well as hearing a sample they played on the show. I decided to log out and browser the library without it knowing any of my details. To my surprise, it was there, along with the 2 other books in the series.
I copied the link, logged back in and pasted the link in. They are not allowed to sell this title in my geographical location. That sucks. I signed up to get that book and now I have a credit that I want to spend on a title that I want, and it happened to be that one. I went into my details and edited my address to one in the US and then I was fine to get the book. It was added to my cart and then purchased with the free credit I had.
Now you have to download special Audible software to download, but it also happens to put it in your music library, in Windows Media Player or iTunes. That is good because I want my audiobook in iTunes so I can hear it on my iPod. After downloading the software and setting it up, which was a simple process, I started downloading the audiobook.
The download was about 200MB so it shouldn’t take too long to download. Boy was I wrong. The download was slow as! I had to leave my laptop on overnight just to download it. If I was able to downloading it myself using my own download manager, I could have had that in less than quarter of an hour, not seven or so hours. The software is horrible and a waste of time. I would rather download it myself and import it into my media player myself. I don’t get why they force the crappy software onto me, there is no reason for it.
After all that nonsense I finally had the audiobook on my computer, although it did import to the wrong iTunes library (story about why I have 2 iTunes libraries one for another day.) Anyway, I easily sorted that out and I could finally listen to my audiobook on my iPod. One of the weird things is that the chapters on the iPod are random, they are not the same as the chapters on the audiobook. This generally shouldn’t be a problem for someone listening to the book from start to finish, even if you you do get out of the book, you can always resume from the place your last stopped.
Anyway, I was pretty happy with the book, and the quality of it. I would definitely consider purchasing the other book from audible even if I am not to happy about suing the software they force you to install. After all the griff graff, for anyone else you is considering giving Audible a try, I would tell them to definitely do it. Although if you live outside the US, make sure you set your country to the US and also everyone should use the TWiT promo site so you can get your free book. 
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Actually, while Audible certainly implies that you need to install their software, it’s in reality merely optional. You can make your selections and download them entirely from a web browser. The only downside to this is that you need to manually drag the downloaded books into your iTunes Library (but this takes about 5 seconds, so it’s not a big deal). Audible doesn’t even offer software for Mac OS X, so that’s how those of us on the other platform use Audible 100% of the time.
As for the “weird” placement of the chapters, they are actually placed at the CD boundaries. That is, Audible imports the books from CD masters, that are pretty much the same as if you bought an audiobook on CD in a store. But when they import them, they don’t make the chapters match the book chapters, they just set them at the points in-between CDs when they join the individual imports together. Mildly irritating, but at least they do take out the “Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Disc 5″ introductions at the start of each disc.
I’m sure you’ll enjoy the Dexter book. Although the plot lines for the first season on Showtime roughly corresponded with the plot of the first book, I find the TV series to be much darker, and less fun. In the book, Dexter is cheerfully homicidal, and points out through observations that he fits very well with Miami because of it. Nick Landrum, the narrator, gives a spot-on performance, nailing the tone with a breezy performance, that will send you out looking for the nearest “media noche” Cuban sandwich in your city.
Have you tried out other audiobook sites like Million Audiobook?
There is no software required for download and you gotta choose the various qualities. The bigger the file size, the better the quality suppose to be, and the longer the download.
However, so far I’ve not notice any differences in quality for the smallest file size.
I’m surprised they didn’t have a fit at your country not being United states. They can easily tell by the credit card what country it’s from.