Downloads Are Still Books

Now, downloadable books. That's a useful thing at least. Great in fact. You can put it on your mp3 player (but not your Apple IPod or many other players you'd like to own or have already) and take it to the woods in your shirt pocket or strapped to your arm...As long as those damned buds fit into your ears. We've listened to recorded books while driving on long trips, lying in a tent at night at a campsite, while tooling around the kitchen--but not while gardening, since the cord keeps getting yanked out of your ears or getting in the way of your weeding tools.

My only criticism is that, again, most mp3 players don't play secure WMA or otherwise don't work with these files. This limits the pool of users, since most people won't by players primarily for this purpose. In a way, downloadable books are better than streaming movies, because those movies often can only be viewed on your computer (Netflix, the library's downloadable DVDs). When streaming movies can go directly to your big-screen TV without a $150 cable, that will be an advance.

So give us more titles to choose from, guys, and Overdrive will really be great.