With disadvantages associated with having audio books in CD formats such as length, costs, convenience, etc, it is now a better option to have them in downloadable digital formats.
Having audio books in downloadable digital formats eliminate the problems of lengths, costs,
convenience, etc. For example, unlike audiocassettes and CDs that can’t carry an audio book except in many tapes and CDs, downloadable digital formats have no length restrictions.
In other words, having audio books in digital formats now defies the limitations and is advantages that both audiocassettes and CDs have.
A great advantage of digital audio books is how fast you can deliver the product from the producer the customer.
For instance, within a few minutes of the audio book being made it can be downloaded by customers… with downloadable digital format. But this will not be with Tapes and compact disks.
Also, the cost to the producer is very low, unlike the cost associated with audiocassette
cassettes and compact disks.
Even with all of these pros, there are still cons. Below is possibly the largest disadvantage of using a digital format for audio books
Bandwidth problems: Unlike how easy it is to download musicals on the Internet, it isn't as easy to download complete audio books - because of the size of audio books.
While the latest pop song of four minutes long may take just a few minutes to download, an audio book lasting several hours will take much longer as the file size will obviously be much larger. It make take up to five hours to download, this depends on the local internet speed and the status of the server at the time of downloading.
This may seem like a really negative point however below are ways you can still get full advantage of audio books in downloadable digital formats, despite this problem:
Solution to the Bandwidth problems: This problem can be solved by doing the download at your free time, not when you want to get the audio book at the same time.
For example, you can start the download and go out to work or go to bed.When you get back or wake up your download would have completed.
Or if you have slow Internet connection at home, you can look for alternative locations to download the audio books. If you have faster Internet connectivity in the office, you can do the download there.
But ensure it is allowed to do that in the office. In other words, talk to your employer about this first to be sure it is allowed. After downloading the audio book you can then take it with you via a zip disk or a flash disk to listen to at home.
An additional solution to bandwidth and internet speed problems is to actually search to find audio books in a special format, for people with low-bandwidth Internet connections. These formats are most often the ones with the highest
compression ratio, this makes the files a lot smaller and therefor the download will be a lot quicker.
An excellent source that I have found for audio book downloads is Spoken Network. You can find them at:
www.spokennetwork.com?cam=ama0015
Tags: audio books, audiobooks, education, learn, learning, read, reading, self help, spoken network, spoken word, study