Quote:
Originally Posted by gamegirl
I just got my 505 and love it. I too check out ebooks from the Fairfax county library.
Would love to know why most of the books that I would love to read are only offered
in audio wma format. Last night I searched for John Grisham and not one book is offered by the library in any format other than audio wma. What's up with that?
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Because low-bitrates wma gives superior sound quality over mp3.
Generally the by now almost 14 years old MP3 file format has been superseded by WMA and OGG.
Here are some details:
WMA uses an internal 'harmonics crystallizer',which basically recreates high frequencies lost in low bitrate encodings.
This is excellent for speech files, as well as recordings of old LP's, audio of video recordings and tapes.
Generally 32kbps to 48kbps WMA encodings are used for speech, preachings, lectures and readings.
48 to 64kbps are used for audiobooks with music in the background,and have comparable quality to 80-128kbps mp3 files.
OGG starts from 80kbps upto about 275kbps. Quality from OGG 80kbps is comparable to 128kbps MP3, and 112kbps ogg (Var Q2) is generally used for live music recordings,comparable to 160kbps MP3.
In other words with either codec you save upto 25% disk space, for the same quality.
Unfortunately indeed that wma is not supported by the reader.
You can listen to it on most mp3 players though...
And that would make more sence, since 500MB of MP3 can get full pretty quickly.
other formats like flac, and ape are more used for mac and Linux are less heard of.
*Edit: So that would be the explanation: 'why WMA?'.
The explanation why audiobooks would be that Sony is updating their library, and that pretty soon you'll see more books in their library available.
I guess the more people buy books, the more people can be hired to input books into the system, and the less the price of an ebook will be..*