Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

audiobook download

I discovered this afternoon that the Arlington County Public Library offers a number of downloadable audiobooks for library members. The majority of the titles available are older works, but the catalog includes a good number of books I keep meaning to read, so, after setting up an account, I bookmarked several titles to download for later listening.

For the most part, the site explains fairly clearly how these audiobook downloads work: The files are in a protected Windows Media format that allows you to “check them out” for three weeks at a time (after which, the files are unusable). Because of the Windows Media rights management, these files are not transferrable to an iPod (but can be transferred to compatible music devices).

Since there are several notices across the site that the files are compatible with Windows Media Player 9 and above, I assumed that, since I have WMP9 for Mac, I could at least listen to my download of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from my desktop. When that didn’t work, I did some digging and found the following notice buried in a FAQ:

Q: Can I download and play an audiobook on a Mac?
A: NetLibrary audiobooks cannot be played on Macs because the latest version of Window Media Player available for Macs (version 9) is based on Windows Media Rights Manager version 1.3. NetLibrary uses version 2.x licenses for eAudiobooks in order to maintain a high level of security. Because the latest version of Windows Media Player for Macs does not support 2.x licenses, NetLibrary audiobooks cannot be played on Macs at this point in time.

If your software is going to lock out an entire popular line of computers, it would make sense to make it clear, early and up-front, that this is the case. All the other technical requirements I’d seen up until that point only mentioned the requirement of Windows Media Player 9 and above — not Windows Media Player 9 and above for PC — which is why I sat through a 40 MB audiobook download. If WMP9 is not the same across all platforms, it’s incredibly user-unfriendly to emphasize that as the only explicit system requirement.