On Rigamarole or The Challenges of Podcasting a book
I received some feedback today in an unusual manner. Months ago, I was interviewed by Rob of Podcast411 and talked quite a bit Podiobooks.com. It seems that at least one of Rob’s listeners is stretching the notion of time-shifted consumption a bit more than most, for he just found time to send feedback to Rob about the show — and our site.
Follows is the excerpt from the email Rob received.
What [Podiobooks.com is] doing in terms of bringing audio books to listeners through podcasting is good. What’s not good is rigmarole they’ve added (signing up, specifiying frequency, etc.) to receiving content. I’ve done just fine with ipodder (now Juice) all along and find this a hindrance. This sort of stuff is slowing the adoption of podcasting. I wish they’d offer an option to skip all of this and just provide a link to a feed. If they’re [doing this] for future marketing or other reasons, they should just be honest about it.
So, Mr. Anonymous Podcast411 commentor¹, allow me respond here as there may be others who have similar opinions.
Nothing in our model prohibits you from using Juice or any other podcatching client. And when you choose a book to listen to, you do get a link to a standard RSS 2.0 feed. The reason for the “rigmarole” is to enhance the listening experience. Wait, before someone blows a gasket and assumes that we’re trying to tell you what is good for you or that we’re the experts, allow me to explain. When was the last time someone handed a book to you and said: “You’re going to love this book. But in order to read it, you have to start where I am — at Chapter 12.” It just doesn’t happen. Books are designed (technical and research materials aside) to be enjoyed from the beginning! And I’m sorry, but I’ve done the whole “play catchup with the author” by downloading all the back-episodes — it’s not easy to do and it breaks the “just deliver it to me when it’s ready” beauty of podcasting. We fixed it with our system. Yes, you do have to register and you do have the option of changing the frequency of the distribution. But I think you’ll find our registration among the least-invasive, and it literally takes a single click to get your custom feed for any book on our site, once you are registered.
And your final comment seems to indicate that we have, or might have, some nefarious plan in mind. How quaint. Instead of wishing people would be honest, people who have simply decided to spend a lot of their available free time building out a resource that gives stuff away for free and, if growing subscriber numbers are any indication, seems to be well received, perhaps a better approach would be weigh the value of their previous actions and then decide if they should be approached with cautious optimism, trepidation or outright distrust.
I think we deserve at least the first of those options.
¹ - As the email was sent to Rob instead of me, Rob did not include the email address for the sender. That’s just good email etiquette, and a rule I follow as well.
August 8th, 2006 at 9:02 am
All of that “rigamarole” is what’s so great about Podiobooks.com, in my opinion. I questioned the need to sign up initially too, but once you think about it the reason becomes clear. Once you have a user account, the system can release episodes to your individual feed one at a time (or all at once if you wish) from start to finish, regardless of what anyone else is doing. If there were simply whole feeds to subscribe to, you would have to manually download episodes from the start and then remember where you were when you wanted to listen to the next episode. Much easier.
You can test this for yourself. Many of the podiobooks here are also available on the author’s websites as traditional feeds. Go and subscribe to one of those, and then after you’ve manually told your podcatcher to download all of the past episodes, and forgotten which episode you were on because you’re listening to too many at once (I regularly have half a dozen going), you may see the value in what podiobooks.com is doing.
Personally, I have my feeds set to realease a new episode every day. That means that every day all I have to do is tell iTunes to update my feeds, then I pop the new episodes onto my iPod and go. It doesn’t matter whether the author is far ahead of me, and I don’t have to remember my progress, I have only the next episode waiting for me when the update is complete.
Your milage may vary, but it seems to me that this makes the whole process easier, rather than harder.
August 8th, 2006 at 9:43 am
Would be helpful to have a “signature” of who is actually blogging on the podiobooks blog. Had to scroll down more than half the way down the page to find out it’s Evo. It’s also not clear if just one person is blogging or if it’s done by different members of the podiobooks staff.
August 8th, 2006 at 10:55 am
Carrie - One of the things on our list of enhancements is to spend some time integrating the blog better into the site. I’m using the default template right now and just haven’t had the time to try and find a better one that works… better.
E.
August 8th, 2006 at 3:58 pm
I don’t find the whole process of registering and clicking a ’subscribe me’ link and setting up the frequency a difficult process. (You only have to do that once, and you’re set for that book)
I really don’t understand what this anonymous poster was talking about.
Perhaps he/she doesn’t understand, that in order for the system to know where you were, it has to know who you are.
I hope mr/mrs anonymous reads this post, and understands the flaw in the reasoning they used.
August 15th, 2006 at 2:49 pm
Personally, all the rigamarole is the reason why I like Podiobooks.com so much. The very small inconvenience of having to register is more than made up in the beauty of the how the system works. It’s simply brilliant, and I have a feeling that Mr. Anonymouse saw the registration and didn’t go any further, which was his loss.
And while the blog’s design in on the plain side, I can play the game of guess the poster.
Anyway - thanks for all that you do to bring us all this wonderful ear candy.