Thursday November 18, 2004

Hearing the battle on the high seas

As a child I spent time sailing with my father. He is a very avid sailor interested in many aspects of sailing from boat building to sailing fiction. One of the first sailing books I remember reading was Chichester's book about solo circumnavigating the globe. But sailing fiction hasn't ever really turned me on until I took my Father to see Master and Commander. I'd always been vaguely aware of the O'Brien books. They took up a shelf on my Father's bookcase. But they hadn't ever really interested me. After seeing Master and Commander I decided to attempt to read them.

I got the first book and started to read it but finding time to read fiction has always been a problem for me. About the same time I had discovered audible books and given the time I spend driving to and from the Bay Area the Aubrey/Maturin series fit right in. But audible books are expensive and after a short time I realized this was a series I wanted to own. The amount of detail is such that I'm sure I will listen to them again. Enter Audible Books. Audible have a subscription offer where, for a flat fee, you can download 2 books per month. This turns out to be roughtly 30% of what I pay for the same books over the counter. After some initial issues with their download and CD burn software¹ I have the process of purchasing two books every month and then burning them onto CD as needed down to a fairly efficient process.

So now I am an Aubrey/Maturien addict. Its hard to go anywhere in the car without tuneing into their latest adventure. On my most recent trip to the Bay Area I listed to the 13th book in the series, The Thirteen Gun Salute. One of the things which suprised me from the beginning was the amount of autonomy the British naval commanders had. In this book Aubrey makes decisions which effect both matters of politics and war. At the end of the book the ship Aubrey has for this mission has run aground in the South China sea and he is stuck on an island with his crew. I can't wait for the next installment of this story!

¹They have a fairly complicated process where you purchase the book, it shows up in your online library, and then you download it (several audio fidelities are offered although I'v only used the best as neither bandwidth nor storage are really an issue for audio) using their software. After that you can download it to a mobile device (something I havn't done yet) or burn it on a CD. This all seems complicated as they could just offer a set of formats to download but I suspect the obfuscation makes it easier for them to make it seem as if they books are not easy to copy. ( Nov 18 2004, 02:55:36 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [2]