Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Can you listen to me now?

Number 22 was to learn about audiobooks and where you can find them. Listened to the tutorial about Netlibrary. The instruction were quite simple and you were walked through all the steps, also let you know how long you could keep the audiobook and if you could renew it and how. And were given other ways to download if you didn't have the required equipment. Even gave instruction if you had dial up.
Then checked out the "Project Gutenberg" site. It had a table of contents which had listings for such things as "site map', "about the project", and "different types of contents contained within the books"

Thought it was neat that there was a listings for books of different languages and how many books were in those languages. There were 2 catagories - "up to 50 books" and "more then 50 books". Some of the languages were: Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, Sanskrit, Yiddish, Gamilaraay and Cebuano - and yes I did spell them correctly.

Had a "Top 100" listing were titles were ranked by how many times the title or file was downloaded. The number 1 title listed on the Top 100 is (as of 7/3/07) "The Manual of Surgery" downloaded 637 times. Number 100 was Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" downloaded 65 times. I tried out number 37 which was "Andersen's Fairy Tales" by Hans Christian Andersen which had 131 downloads. When you went to download there appeared a page with the chapters and how long they were. This book was live read in other words read by a person, not computer read.

It was interesting the range and extend of titles, and the number of times those titles have been used. When I had a ways to travel to work I got in the habit of listening to audiobooks, which sometimes were better then reading the book. You could get hooked on a certain reader - some had better voices and used more changes of voices for the different characters, and the music and sound effects added to the story. I have two versions of the Left Behind series on audio. One were the story is just read and the other is called the "dramatized", which was much better because it had background music, sound effects and more then one person doing the reading - really enjoyed that version.


http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top

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