Audiobooks

Audiobooks are a wonderful way for patrons to "read" if they are visually impaired or want something different. I always find it easier to listen to an audiobook of a difficult work (take something by Nietzsche, for example) than to actually read it myself. As an employee at Borders, I find older people and children to like audiobooks the most. They're even more convenient if you are going on a long drive somewhere or have a flight to catch.

I was not previously familiar with LibriVox. This site is a wonderful FREE place to find audiobooks. Given the universal format of the sound files (.mp3 mostly), patrons would find it simple to download the chapters they want and upload them to an iPod (or even burn them to a CD). In a school library setting, this would be an incredibly useful source as schools have lost library funding and many high schoolers need help with understanding and reading classics. I searched for 4 or 5 public domain books and LibriVox had all of them.

So far, this is the only tool that has been worth learning about because of its apparent practical implications in a library setting. I hope the forthcoming ones are more along these lines and not a waste of time and completely irrelevant like Flickr or creating a blog (because who didn't do that in high school?).