More on Podcasting and Audible

October 13th, 2004

Jenny sent in this commentary from eweek, which discusses Audible and Podcasting:

“This functionality is already possible for customers of the Audible service, which offers its audio book customers paid subscriptions to NPR and other radio programs. Audible provides desktop client software capable of automatically downloading content from the company’s servers and loading it onto customers’ portable devices. The software also offers optional automated disk space management capabilities that store only the most current edition of specific programs on the portable.”

“While Audible is clearly a ‘pay for play’ content provider, Podcasting opens the door to a much larger universe of content offerings, available from the producers’ own servers. Podcasting seems particularly well-suited to free content downloads, and I look forward to a day in the near future when I might subscribe to my favorite BBC programming rather than being forced to listen to it live over the air or on the Internet.”

As I mentioned in my rant on Pirillo’s show, I really think that libraries can do something here. Many libraries already provide audio books in Mp3 format (some of them via Audible) and I think podcasting can be an extension between the library catalog and audible. A scenario:

A patron looks up a book on the library catalog and comes across a file in Mp3 format (maybe it’s music, a “talking book” or any other type of media) and then puts in into his Ipod. Then, he has the ability to subscribe to the feed for a particular author, genre, or subject heading and when a new file comes out that fits his criteria (just like any personalized RSS Feed), it is automatically downloaded into his Ipod.

There are licensing and copyright issues here. I totally get that. But libraries have always worked with these licensing requirements in the past and can do so in the future with podcasting.

Also, take a look at what John Anderies had to say about his ideas for podcasting and music libraries. Very interesting.

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