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Since I’ve had my iPod Nano, I’ve really started using it with audiobooks. I’ve never listened to audiobooks before (in any format) but there is a certain type of book that really lends itself to an audio book. Plus I’ve really come to enjoy the force feeding of the book, not havisdng to actually hold one and turn the page. Listening to books in bed is really a lot easier than reading them. One downside is falling asleep, and losing your place. Especially when you are just about to fall asleep, and you’re drifting in and out of sleep and don’t catch it all.
Once thing I’ve found is that purchasing and managing audiobooks is another thing that Apple has done a great job at. Browsing, purchasing, downloading and installing books with iTunes store is just as easy as working with Songs. I tried Audible.com once, and found their web interface is horrible. Its complicated to choose the right format, and many of the books on their site have horrible sound quality. Once you have a book from Audible, its not intuitive or easy to manage it. Eventually you can import it into iTunes and then manage it. But its much easier to shop at the iTunes store.
Which leads me to this post- the first book in the Narnia series (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) is about to be released, and I enjoyed reading the Narnia books way back in probably 6th or 7th grade. So I decided to grab TLTWTW from the iTunes store and see how it read now, many years later. The book is an excellent one for the audio format, for being written as a children’s book, it lends itself very well to be read aloud.
Its quite short, so I’ve since grabbed the 2nd and 3rd books in the series and have been listening to them. Once thing that strikes me over and over again, is how much J.K. Rowling has ripped off the Narnia Books. Much of the feeling of the children is the same, and there is even blatant cribbing where the children are pulled back into the kingdom of Narnia from a train station, waiting for the train to take them back to school. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? I’m sure imitation is the highest form of flattery, but its weird to realize that much of the Harry Potter world comes right from C.S. Lewis.
Speaking of that, there is a great biography of CS Lewis at the iTunes store.