As I mentioned earlier in a post I have recently started listening to audio books (mainly because at that time I was feeling too sick to read or work on the computer). Since then I have read(heard) a couple of them and most of them were pretty good. For me mp3 is the best medium as I can use it on any platform i.e. I can listen to them on my computer/phone/CD player in car.
A couple of days ago I was going through John Scalzi’s blog and I saw a note that METAtropolis (A novel he edited) had been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and was available for a free download at Audible.com (Still available for free as of 11th April 2009) I decided to go ahead and download it. This was because
a) The book sounded very interesting
b) It was free
c) The book sounded interesting.
So I went ahead and registered on the site and tried to download the book. I must have spent a good 1/2 hour on the site trying to download it on my Linux system but was unable to do so. At first the stupid site kept trying to force me to install a windows program on my system even when I told it that I wanted to listen to it as an MP3 or on a CD player. Then finally I somehow convinced the system to allow me to download but alas I still didn’t get to listen to the book. What I got was a 300 byte file with a weird name and a .py extension containing a long text string that looked like part of a URL.
Ultimately I gave up. If I had paid for the book I would have been really upset. I still fail to understand why they want me to download a program on my system before letting me download a mp3 file that can be played on any system.
In any case I don’t think I will be downloading/purchasing any more books from them in the near future.
– Suramya