Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

I have an amazing family. My first (and only, so far) iPod was given to me as a gift from my mom. I love it. First thing after getting it, I rounded up all my CDs and ripped them, then I opened an iTunes account and started buying music. Recently my brother pointed me to audible.com. This is a great site.

If you spend any time at all commuting and you have (or are planning to get) and iPod, you should join audible. It's an audiobook download site that has more titles than you can imagine. Yesterday I downloaded The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson. This purchase is apt (and ironic) since audible.com is clearly a long tail kind of service (more on that in a subsequent post).

Audible.com provides several membership levels. The one they claim is the most popular is $14.95 per month and gives you one free audiobook per month. As a member you receive deep discounts on any additional purchases per month. If you don't want to buy into a monthly program, you can just buy audiobooks on their site. I'm excited because I can now fill my commute with something useful and positive.

This may be soon be another site I can't live without.

I should point out that an iPod is not required to use audible.com audiobooks. You can use any digital audio player (MP3 player) or listen to the audiobooks on your computer.