I finished listening to the George Carlin book today. It was mostly
the same experience as listening to one of his albums and in a few
cases was the same material I first heard on albums. His delivery
makes already funny stuff even funnier. I would definitely consider
becoming an Audible customer, if only they had some way of hooking up
their DRM crap to my iRiver SlimX. As it is, I’ll be looking at
BookEars or other places that sell audiobooks on MP3 CDs. It makes so
much sense to me to do it this way, when you can put 10 or more hours
of book on a single CD. Beats that tall stack of tapes with the
bizarre “part 1 on the left channel, part 3 on the right” schemes to
put more stuff on one tape.

While I’m talking audiobooks, I should mention the company founded by
author Bruce Coville, Full
Cast Audio. I don’t actually know Mr. Coville but I do run in
similar online SF circles (which is how I first learned about FCA –
from his group on Dueling Modems.) He has a taste for similar films as
I do, and seems like a good guy. What Full Cast Audio does is do big
production versions of prose fiction. It’s more like Seeing Ear
Theater than an audiobook. He has a free sample, one of his
stories up there, available for download or he’ll even send you a tape
for free. As best I can tell, all the material is the kind of young
adult fiction he writes, which translates into fun for the whole
family. Slap some of these babies on your Diamond Rio and plug it into
the car stereo during long trips. I wish this kind of technology was
available when I was a kid living in western Kansas, where any
vacation involved driving at least 3 or 4 hours, 8 or 9 for the good ones.