I get the most use out of it by downloading audio books for my commute. To listen to the audiobooks, you must have a device that supports protected/secure wma audio format, which the iPod does NOT support. But lots of other devices do.
My one beef is that the audio books are in two formats, “CD (34 kpbs) and Radio (4 kpbs) quality”. Sorry, but 34kpbs is nowhere near CD quality, and sounds like a scratchy AM station. It’s OK for an audiobook, but still incorrect to call it CD quality. I haven’t tried the 4 kbps “radio” quality, it must sound like something Edison recorded and stored at the bottom of a swamp.
If you are talking about the Overdrive Audio Book format, all you need is a desktop computer that supports wma format, and then you can burn the audiobook to CD and listen to it anywhere.
Not sure, I never heard of that format. In any case, it might be possible to burn netlibrary’s wma to CD, although you’d need some method to break it into multiple CDs. The audiobook I’m listening to now, for example, is a single file that’s about 15 and a half hours long.
Well, there’s no mention of “overdrive” at netlibrary.com that I can find. It just says “the only requirement is that the device must be able to support playback of secure or protected wma files.”