You are an audiobook fan and you just bought one of the three million iPads sold in the last 90 days. You may well ask how good is it for listening to audiobooks. It is essentially just a heavy iPod. Yes, you can down load your audiobooks from iTunes as usual from your one
synced computer. The only exception to this is of course is Apple’s audiobooks sold on iTunes which can be purchased and downloaded directly to your iPad. This is a huge advantage if you travel a lot and like to make spontaneous purchases. You of course have the same ability on any iTunes capable wireless device, such as iPhone and iTouch. The much larger iPad interface however makes browsing audiobooks on iTunes much easier.
Apple has essentially made the entire Audible.com library available to you through iTunes. iTunes offers about a 15% discount over Audible making it a good alternative to Audible for direct purchases. iTunes does not offer a monthly discount plan, so if you are a moderate listener your Audible one-book-a-month would cost you $14.95. For two books a month this would be $22.95 or about $11.50 per book. Many iTunes books sell for around $9.95, but best sellers cost from around $21 to $26 or more per audiobook.
The iPad does not currently support direct download from any other audiobook source, Barnes & Noble, Borders, eMusic and SimplyAudiobooks are not supported by the iPad’s Safari browser. The Audible website also does not support iPad’s Safari and is partially dysfunctional on the iPad at this time.
The biggest issue with the iPad is the obvious one, portability. Listening while exercising is of course impossible. It is not generally feasible to carry your iPad all of the time, making it difficult to continue listening to your audiobook when you find a few spare minutes.
The case for listening to audiobooks on the iPad is best made when you travel often and are iPad centric for information and entertainment.
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Sammy Sal on 12.03.2010
interesting