Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Bonjour from Boulder

Greetings from Boulder, CO--home of OCLC's NetLibrary eBooks and eContent development. A group of us from Dublin has been out here, learning about the intricacies of how to create audiobooks, eBooks and more.

It's been a steep learning curve, for sure. 77,635 eBook titles and counting. They load about 1200 new titles every month. And audiobooks come soon. The NetLibrary technology team has tested something like 40 different portable devices for the .wma playback for audiobooks through the Windows MediaPlayer, which has DRM capabilities built-in.

Non-English content is going to start happening in a big way in 2005, I hear--especially for Latin American Spanish.

As Jay Jordan, our CEO, likes to say, "It's a great time for libraries!"

1 comment:

Alice said...

I hear ya--I asked the exact same question. I am one of those millions of iPod users. I have an old-school 5GB, with the wheel that actually turns as it clicks.

We're working with Apple on resolving the issue. I know that much.

From what I understand in our audiobook crash course last week, wma is the only format to have the acceptable levels of digital rights management (DRM) built in.

It's an issue we will continue to work on. Part of it, unforunately, is out of our control!