5th Entry

For the topic of podcasts I first listened to one of the Sarah Long interviews. She spoke to two men from Holland who created a coffee table book about libraries they had toured in the United States. They called it the Shanatchic Tour in honor of storytellers in Ireland who would travel from town to town and tell stories in exchange for food and lodging. They displayed great passion for libraries and discussed their goal of "libraries without walls," meaning the ability to share stories and knowledge as a global community.

I found that one of the man's last names is Boekesteijn which sounds like "Book stein." That's almost as good as the Library Cop's name from Seinfeld being Bookman. I should consider changing my name to this.

Somewhere along the line I learned that POD stands for "Personal On Demand." Makes sense.

I was disappointed that I couldn't download a book. I did download the Overdrive Media but when I attempted to download a book into it, I got an error message that the parameters are incorrect. I took it to Spencer in Computer Services who was unable to help me. Then I emailed Michelle Vonderhaar, who told me to download the Overdrive Media to the C drive, but I see that the site is down for maintenance today. Michelle told me to blog about it if I continued to have trouble, which is what I just did.

Browsing the available books to download, I was surprised at the selection at first, but came to realize that the most books available are newer books and best sellers, which is fine, but in general not what I would find appealing. Also, for some reason if a book is "checked out" you have to place a hold on it. I don't understand why the quantity of downloads is finite. If the website offers a book, can't it be downloaded an infinite number of times?

It may be best that I was unable to download a book anyway, as I find listening to a book on tape or CD to be kind of silly, especially when a male narrator acts out a female voice.