Victory!

I don't mean to brag, but I am a superstar. This weekend I downloaded one of the library's audiobooks and it was totally easy. This saga goes back, golly, over a year now, to when we had a meeting here at work about the ebooks and were given a "tutorial" about how to instruct patrons in how to download and listen/read. At that meeting I took about 2 pages of notes, including instructions on how to register your device/reader, blah blah blah. I came down to my office from the meeting, thinking everything was fresh in my mind so I should be able to do everything easy peasy, but NO! When push came to download shove I was unable to get my computer to download the file--this may have been because I was doing the download inside the library, but staff computers are not subject to the same restrictions as the public computers (i.e. deep freeze therefore nothing gets saved on the hard drive, ever), so I never figured out what the matter was. Of course, I never really pursued it either, because I have an iPod and can't download any of our ebooks to it anyway, so the whole exercise was sort of academic.
So, flash forward to yesterday, when I had a few minutes to spare and was online at home and thought I would give it another go, since it is part of our 2.0 training. At the very least I could blog about how traumatic an experience it was. But it was delightfully trauma-free--I did have to get myself a new account, since the one I set up all those months before was no longer valid (or else I forgot my username and password, either way), but once I did that it was smooth sailing. My best guess is that in the intervening year they maybe streamlined the process, or else I got smarter. I was even able to listen to a little bit of it already.
One thing I noticed as I was looking for something to download was that they don't appear to be getting much use. Almost all the titles I browsed were available for download, but I will go on record as saying that I don't know what the use statistics are and that I have no empirical evidence to back up this statement, just what I saw on this particular day. And the pickin's were slim, but you can't have everything. I was able to borrow part three of a trilogy, where we own the first two books on CD but don't own the 3rd one on audio at all, so all's well that ends well. And god knows I see enough people on the train plugged into to one or more devices, so it's not that people are technophobes. Maybe they are (shudder) buying their audiobooks? I wonder what it's like to have disposable income...