WCL has over 600,000 books, 450,000 magazines, and 85,000 cds, DVDs, videos and other items at our central library and 11 branches. We are located in New Zealand's capital city, Wellington.
We have a great range of audiobooks available via our new Overdrive.com subscription, which you can download and listen to via your computer or when you're mobile. There's Norah Roberts, classic novels, language tapes, self improvement titles, Little Britain, biographies... the list goes on. Available all hours, we're ready when you are!
2 comments:
Good marks for innovation - but no support for iPods etc and being locked into MS DRM technology makes it worthless and too much of a pain for me. There are much easier ways to get audiobooks on my iPod.
Dear iPod Users,
In order to provide a digital audio book service to our customers, we are bound to comply with the conditions of distribution as agreed with content publishers. In this case it means using files with Windows Digital Rights Management protection.
Wellington City Libraries would love to provide digital audiobooks in a format more compatible with iPods and Macs but unfortunately there is no vendor providing this service for libraries.
It is certainly not our intent to exclude iPod users, and we look forward to the day when Apple and Microsoft can come to an agreement which will allow downloads to both types of systems.
For those who would like to determine if their portable audio devices are compatible, the following site lists WMA (Windows Media Audio) portable devices, which will allow the downloading of OverDrive’s digital audio files:
http://www.playsforsure.com/FindPortableDevices.aspx
We would rather make the content available to as many users as possible, than not at all. We are committed to providing equity of access as far as we are able, which is why in the near future we will be providing compatible MP3 players for patrons to borrow.
In addition to the ability to transfer and play audio book titles on the hundreds of supported digital audio devices, many of the titles can also be burned to standard CD for your personal use.
Library Journal has published these two articles which provide some useful background about the incompatibility issues:
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA602667.html and
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6279947.html
We remain hopeful that there will be a technical solution that will allow our public libraries to provide digital audio for a greater range of devices in the future.
Denise Clarkson
Team Leader, Collection Services
Wellington City Libraries
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