Playaway

My plan for finishing the vast majority of the books in my classics list is to listen to them. I like fast reads, which many of these are not. I know me and I know I'll have a hard time making myself sit down and plow through them, so having someone else read them to me while I do other productive stuff gives me a much better chance of actually working my way through the list.

Right about the first of the year I put The Outsiders and Jane Eyre on cd on hold at the library. They came a few days later and I picked them up, transferred all 5 cds of The Outsiders to my iTunes, then transferred it all to my iPhone. Then I got out my headphones and went to work on the bathrooms. Except apparently the cds were badly scratched and about 2 chapters in the book became unlistenable. The same was true for Jane Eyre I was very annoyed.

And so I shunned cds and returned to my beloved Playaways.

Hopefully you've heard of Playaways, but it not, they're pretty much the greatest thing ever. It's a pre-loaded audio player. It's like an ipod devoted to just one book that you can check out, use your own headphones, and return. No transferring to a device or switching cds or anything. It can't get scratched and it's small enough to easily fit in your pocket if you're running or working around the house or whatever.

Plus, if the narrator is kind of a slow talker you can actually speed up the play a bit. When I listened to one of Rick Riordan's Lightning Thief books on Playaway last year I LOVED the narrator but he spoke really slowly. So I sped him up and thoroughly enjoyed my listening experience.

Unfortunately, there are a couple downsides. The first is that the audio quality is not great. The first one I ever listened to was Sense and Sensibility and the audio quality was so bad at first I almost couldn't listen. It seemed to improve after the first chapter but it was still not awesome. Every one I've had since then has been of varying clarity and quality.

The second downside is that there is limited availability of books right now. The concept is fairly new so they're still releasing books and libraries are still acquiring them. I looked for several books on my list on Playaway and either they haven't been released or my library doesn't carry them yet. However, every time I check my library has more and more so it's possible that many of the books I'd like to listen to will be available by the end of the year (if not I'll just read them the old fashioned way).

I've still got one book on cd in the car for when I'm driving around (which isn't often. It will take me forever to work through that one), but for the most part I've devoted myself to Playaways.