When the VCCS first acquired Overdrive, I downloaded some audiobooks just to learn how Overdrive worked. For the past few years I've made a point of telling students about Overdrive when I conduct orientations to the library for SDV 100 classes, but I haven't seen a great deal of interest in Overdrive in my library. A few times a year students may ask about it, and we've had community borrowers who have been disappointed when they learn they don't have access to Overdrive audiobooks. The article by Beth Farrell starts out with her writing about a public library patron who drove 150 miles round-trip to access audiobooks! I just haven't seen that level of interest here!
I was interested in learning the statistics on Overdrive use, so I looked it up and saw that for this year the monthly number of Overdrive items checked out ranges from 167 to 268. One of the questions for this week is what we think of the user rating option. From what I could see, many of the items on Overdrive haven't been rated by students ( I assume a green star means an item has been rated).
I looked at LibriVox, which I had never heard of before. It is apparently to audiobooks what Project Gutenberg is to e-books. All of the audiobooks are recorded by volunteers, and I listened to "Twas the Night Before Christmas," which was spoken alternately by a child and an adult. If you listen to audiobooks, it is a wonderful free resource for works in the public domain.
I didn't know anything about the cost of audiobooks, so I was surprised by the information on cost in Farrell's article. She indicates that "Downloadable audiobook prices themselves vary wildly: an individual title can cost anywhere from $25 to $100, depending on its length and publisher, while unlimited-access title sets can range in cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars."
I had never heard of Ingram Digital, which currently has a little over 8,000 audiobook titles, as compared to Overdrive's 38,000 titles. I didn't realize Overdrive was so far ahead of its competitors.
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