Plugging into audio books

Living increasingly hurried, harried lives today compels most of us to limit our leisure reading to the daily newspaper, an occasional magazine, or very rarely, a book. Now if, off and on, you’re nagged by an aching desire to take up reading seriously, but have nodded away the wish knowing that you’ll never manage to eke out the time,

maybe you should try using your ears instead of your eyes. Yes, we’re talking about listening to books and articles on various subjects rather than reading them. And no, it’s not at all as complicated as you might think. All you need is either a laptop, PC, iPod, cell phone, or any other media player.

Aural pleasures
Point your browser to the Internet Archive (www. archive.org), LibriVox (www.archive.org [1]), MP3 Audio Books (http://audiofreemp [2] 3books.com), Project Gutenberg (www. gutenberg.org/browse/categories/1), AudioBookForFree (www.audiobooksforfree.com [3]) and last but not least, Audible (www.audible.com [4]) and take a look at what’s available. And all for free! You’ll be amazed by the immense variety of aural pleasures that lurk here. The flavours can range from the low brow to the exalted and exotic — from P.G. Wodehouse chuckles to T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, the Greek myths to genetic toxicology. Once you’ve downloaded what you want to a mobile player device, you can listen to it wherever you want — while lolling around, waiting for a bus, walking your dog…

Podcasting tools
If books do not keep you enthralled, you can also spend many a pleasant hour listening to specific subject podcasts — again on your phone or a PC and laptop. The easiest way to do this is to download a free podcast aggregator from www.podcastalley.com [5] like Juice (http://juicereceiver [6]. sourceforge.net). Or fetch iTunes (www.apple [7]. com/ itunes). Among the scores of categories available on these, you’ll find everything from photography to politics, movies to technology, health to science, spirituality to sports to what have you.
Blinking blankly at all this podcast hokum? Then, listen up. A podcast is an audio recording (a file, or set of several files) distributed over the Internet that can be downloaded for playback to a media player and PC. And no, we’re not talking about people putting audio files up for grabs on a web page. We’re talking about audio content — usually in MP3 format — that is published on the web using special software and then systematically and automatically delivered via web feeds to your PC/media player.

Dedicated sites
You can also check out dedicated steaming audio podcast websites like Stitcher (www.stitcher [8]. com), Flycast (www.flycast.fm [9]), or Nobex Radio Companion (www.nobexrc [10]. com). All these are available on the PC and selectively via Wi-Fi and GPRS/EDGE for Blackberry, iPhone, Android and Palm phone platforms. There’s more than you can ever hope to listen to and it’s all regularly updated. Just remember, to keep the experience personal and more immersive, plugging in a pair of headphones always works better. Happy listening!
The writer is a part-time publishing consultant and a full-time devotee of all things tech. He can be contacted at ashishone@gmail.com [11]