Thing #22: In which Stacey goes into Overdrive

I will confess that once I heard we could go out of order, I decided to take complete advantage and do all of the fun ones first. :)

I'm already familiar with Overdrive and NetLibrary and have demonstrated it to customers. It became personal last year when I decided to ask for an mp3 player for Hanukkah. The big decision...to iPod or not to iPod. Price aside, the biggest reason I decided not to iPod was the fact that for audiobooks, iPod only works with iTunes. Not very civil of them. Since I did not want my life controlled by Apple, I went with a Sansa and have been very happy. (Plus for the same price as a Nano, I got twice as much storage space!)

Anywho, I've downloaded several audiobooks onto my Sansa using Overdrive and NetLibrary. I have found Overdrive to be much more user-friendly and was not sad at all when we decided to discontinue our NetLibrary subscription. I have listened to a few of the books that I've downloaded, but a drawback for me is that the main time I get to listen to the book is right before I go to bed and then I fall asleep and have missed huge chunks of story! Oh well, I'll have to work on that!

The reserve feature works very well. I received an e-mail when my title was in and then was able to download it. Probably the most important thing to remember is to be sure to download the Overdrive software before downloading any books. Otherwise, the books won't open up correctly. I learned that the hard way.

I had planned to give my 23Things mp3 player to Sophie, since I already have a very nice one, but then a friend had mentioned that she was going to use hers just for audiobooks and use her old one for music. Hmmm.....