It has been years since I paid any attention to Audible.  However, my driving has increased as of late and I thought now would be a good opportunity to look back into the whole “books on tape” thing.  I must say that I’m pretty impressed.  For $14.95/month, I’m getting one audio book each month and a monthly subscription to an audio version of the Wall Street Journal.  Having never been a WSJ reader, I must say that I’m impressed with their content – especially the editorial.  Furthermore, the iPod knows full well about Audible’s format and conveniently files all of the content under Audio Books and a genre of Spoken Word.

However, I have to question why Audible makes available content in MP3 yet still has some goofy wrapper they put around it.  The file still comes down as a .aa file, not a .mp3 file, and requires some extra stuff in the likes of Windows Media Player in order for the content to play back.  Simply renaming the .aa to .mp3 is not sufficient.  If anyone has insight into this, I’d love hearing from you.