Quote:
Originally Posted by Purple Lady
It isn't any ereader - this is on the page for the premium service:
*You can read on any e-reader with a modern web browser installed, or any of our apps.
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Genuine thanks for the correction. After I made the post, I saw something that made me think that they do have a proprietary app that you have to use. The advantage seemed to be that that app could run on many different platforms.
This pertains to audiobooks, not ebooks. I bought an Nook audiobook from B&N, assuming that I could play it on my laptop or MP3 player. Nope. You have to play it on a smartphone, running iOS or Android of course. I don't even own a functional smartphone. I returned the audiobook, of course.
Life was so much simpler in the 70's, when you could just buy the 8-track tape of the album that you wanted and just pop it into your 8-track stereo. Vinyl records were also still very common, too. You could just drop one of those babies (or a whole stack, if you were so inclined, on the turntable's thingie at the top of the spindle), on the turntable and play it (or the whole stack, as the case may be). Oh, and many younger people may not realize this, but you didn't have to buy an album if you, say, only wanted one song on it. There were smaller diameter, higher speed ("45's"--45 rpm's I think they were, although one size played at 33 rpm, and it seemed like a 78 rpm came in there somewhere; the same machine could play all of them) vinyl records, that were widely sold, with a song, usually the more popular one of the two, on one side (the "A" side) and a less popular song on the "B" side. Then, there was the quantum leap to cassette tapes--still simple: buy the album that you wanted and pop it into any cassette player (preferably stereo). If you wanted to hear just one song on it, you'd fast forward the tape until you got to it.
And there were no digital books. None. Not unless they were in some experimental stage in some lab somewhere.