They Want Their MP3
Digital audiobooks are 'extremely cool' for students
Walter Minkel -- School Library Journal, 7/1/2004
Duane Bean, a reading teacher at Willamina Middle School in rural Grand Ronde, OR, has been loaning his two MP3 players to students overnight. That way they can take turns reading and listening to stories, such as E. B. White's Charlotte's Web and Gary Paulsen's Hatchet, on devices they think are "extremely cool." Now Bean's students, mostly seventh and eighth graders who are reading several grades below where they should be, are coming up to him and announcing, "I read 20 pages yesterday!" When Bean recently received his class's scores on Oregon's standardized reading test, he was pleased to see that all but one of his 12 students had demonstrated solid improvement—one had increased his score by 85 percent, and another's had jumped a staggering 1,100 percent.
Reading teachers and librarians have long known that struggling readers with learning disabilities succeed better when they read with what's called "audio support"—in other words, listening to a book being read aloud while they follow along. The vast majority of these students receive audio support via cassette tapes or the book-and-tape combination sets marketed by companies such as Listening Library and Recorded Books. But the time is coming when cassettes will be replaced by MP3 audiobooks.
MP3's digital files have one big advantage over cassettes and standard CDs—they use very little memory. Thus an entire novel can be stored on one disk, or on an individual MP3 player. By way of comparison, Tim Ditlow, vice president and publisher of Random House's Listening Library division, says that his company's recording of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix takes up 17 cassettes or 23 CDs. But for now, very few schools use digital audiobooks.
That could change if a new digital product called AV Books hits it big. AV Books, created by a fledgling Florida company of the same name, are audiobooks published in MP3 format on a standard CD, and can be listened to on an Apple iPod or a similar device. But to experience AV Books at their best, they need to be viewed on a computer screen; the stories appear as printed pages, complete with illustrations.
Teachers who have examined AV Books' software feel that it could make a real difference for struggling readers. Sandi Benson, a reading specialist in the Broward County, FL, public schools, for example, says that because the software highlights each sentence on a screen "as it is being read by a professional reader, [it] would help enormously in addressing the problems of [students] staying on task." Although no books are yet available in AV Books format, Recorded Books has created a pilot version of Jack London's The Call of the Wild to test in schools. The biggest obstacle to offering AV Books for sale right now is that major book publishers are very concerned about digital books' susceptibility to piracy.
The only distributor of digital books that has met with any success so far is Audible.com (www.audible.com), which offers more than 7,000 titles from major publishers. The New Jersey-based company's books don't use the easily copied MP3 format; instead, Audible relies on its heavily protected AA (short for "Audible audiobook") format that satisfies nervous publishers. Audible also sells an MP3 player called the "Otis"—the same one Bean's class uses—that's required to play its audiobooks. Although a few libraries nationwide, such as the Darien (CT) Public Library, are now lending Audible's titles, there's a hitch: libraries must lend patrons the Otis players along with the audiobooks. Audible, however, is currently working on a plan to make it easier for public and school libraries to loan out its titles. In about a year, borrowers may be able to visit a library's Web site and download its audiobook files onto their laptops and iPods. Then, when the loan period's up, the files will automatically disappear from users' MP3 players.
