Podcasts Galore

I love podcasts. Years ago when 'Hack' was the regular morning program on Triple J it used to drive me crazy that is was such a good show and I never got to listen to it. Now, sadly it's been cut down to half an hour from 5:30 - 6pm and while it does mean that I get to listen to it slightly more often, most nights I still don't finish work until 6:00. Enter the podcast. I love the idea that you can listen to the radio programs you want to whenever you like. It's completely changed the way I listen to radio programs and I did hear that the audience for 'the science show' has doubled since it was made available on podcast and the Chaser boys sent their ratings through the roof as soon as they started doing the rounds on You Tube (did anyone notice that You Tube launched its Australian site this week?) which just goes to show how gosh darn useful downloadable media is. I regularly download the vodcast of the Chaser's War on Everything (due to it's timeslot clashing with House) and I've streamed episodes of Newstopia due to our SBS reception being crap. Podcasts also mean I have access to programs from all around the globe - my favourite being 'Grammar Girl' although I don't think my grammar has actually improved much as I'm still fairly hit and miss and tend to type in something like stream of consciousness. Plus sometimes I start sentences I just don't know how to stop which I believe is referred to as the 'train wreck' approach to grammar. However I digress.

There is also a wealth of Podcasts that you just wouldn't find on the radio at all, people who just have something to say - entertaining, educational, completely wacky and utterly useless there is no screening process other than the end user making a choice as to what they want to consume.
It's not hard to see how we could use this in the library. We already have people who come in to read the local paper onto tape for the visually impaired, a spot on Southern FM telling people what's new in the library, plus when we have speakers there's always someone disappointed that they'll have to miss out due to another commitment at that time. We already have downloadable resources for kids and we could promote our holiday drama activities and Bookbugs book club with online clips of just how chaotic, and fun, things can get.

I've downloaded a few audio ebooks - things I couldn't get at the library naturally - which is also much faster than individually loading in the disks from a book on CD. Unfortunately a lot of the things I wanted were prohibitively expensive or only available at an affordable price if they were abridged and I just can't stand an abridged book. It's one of those things that I feel is deeply wrong with the world. I did however get the MP3 version of Yes Prime Minister which made me very happy. I know MP3 books didn't work very well at the library due to compatibility issues (less face it, they were a pain) but I wonder how long it will be before we just skip the middle man and start offering free downloads of audio ebooks, particularly since we're already offering free ebooks on our website. I think the future of ebooks is really in the audio as while I have actually downloaded and read an entire ebook on my computer, it's not something I would like to repeat and not nearly as easy as just picking up the book in hardcopy. It's just not possible to get lost in a book that starts to hurt your eyes after a while and I don't know about other people's computers but there is far too much going on on mine for me to ever be able to concentrate for any real period of time.

I haven't put any of my podcasts into my bloglines account because iTunes is always running in the background of my computer, automatically checks for updates and tells me when a new episode has been downloaded. Then it automatically uploads it to my ipod and deletes any podcasts that I have already listened to. I've already got the whole thing so efficient that I really don't need bloglines to tell me when new episodes become available. Plus, did I mention I dislike bloglines with a passion? I think I did.

Well this has been a very long and rambling post and now you know more that you ever wanted to about what I think of podcasts, vodcasts, ebooks, audio books and MP3 books so I think perhaps I will leave it there. Well done to you for sticking with it all the way through.