ResourceBlog Article: Audiobooks and the Academic Library

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Friday, 13th November 2009

Audiobooks and the Academic Library

A new blog post by Joshua Kim focuses on the importance of audiobooks in the academic library.

Three cheers for the educators at Syracuse and UW Madison for refusing to purchase new Kindle's until the speech-to-text feature meets accessibility standards. It is beyond stupid that Amazon neglected to provide spoken menu options, therefore making it impossible for sight impaired readers to access the speech to text feature.

[Snip]

When it comes to advocating for audiobooks to be included in academic library collections I'll admit to some strong vested interests. I'm a huge audiobook fanatic. Too much of my money goes to Amazon to pay for my Audible platinum membership.

We wonder if the author knows that it's likely he has access to a treasure trove of audiobooks from his public library that he can download from any Internet computer from sources like OverDrive and NetLibrary. According to his brief but very impressive bio, Mr. Kim is senior learning technologist and an adjunct in sociology at Dartmouth which is located in Hanover, NH. The Howe Library (the public library in Hanover) does offer audiobooks by way of a statewide program.

I've long thought that the academic librarian worry about Google's book digitization effort is misplaced, and the real worry should be about the dominance that Amazon has in the digital book world. It is great that Amazon is finally getting some competition in the e-reader business, but I worry that their control of the audiobook market through Amazon will stifle the kind of innovations and partnership with libraries that I'm suggesting.

NetLibrary offers eAudiobook services to academic libraries. They have several thousand audio titles and from what I can tell the company does work with academic libraries. For example, The McDonald Library at Xavier Unversity has a page explaining how to download audio from NetLibrary (http://www.xavier.edu/library/help/netLibrary.cfm) and UNC-Greensboro has about 1100 audio titles from NetLibrary.

Does OverDrive have an academic library program? From what we can tell, they don't but we plan to call OverDrive find out for sure. If they don't have one perhaps they have one in the works. Last week OverDrive announced a program for K-12 libraries named AudioBook Classroom.

If Amazon does not provide this generation with the opportunity to fall in love with books through audio then they may loose the next generation of readers and book buyers. Providing audiobooks for check-out is an example where, by working together, Amazon and academic libraries can both increase overall reading and make their collections accessible to all learners.

Source: Inside Higher Ed

See Also: Regarding eReading devices, don't forget the Ray Kurzweil in collaboration with the National Federation for the Blind is launching an eReader later this month. The software will be free and work on Mac's, PC's, iPhones and other devices. Revenue will come from content that will be for sale. Bakery & Taylor is a partner. The software will and will also have audio capabilities. More in this post.

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