This Friday, December 6, Audible Inc., a provider of spoken audio services for content download and playback on personal computers, will release a Mac compatible version of their Otis portable digital audio player. Mac users will soon be able to download audio files, transfer them to the Otis, and listen to any of Audible’s 34,000 hours of spoken audio on the go, company spokesperson Jonathan Korzen said.
The Audible.com Otis has 64MB of internal memory and a card slot for adding an external SD memory card. It can play MP3 files, as well as Audible’s own secure audio formats. The Otis can store and play up to 18 hours of Audible audio in internal memory. You can increase this via the external memory card.
The Otis is available for free when you join one of Audible’s flat-rate AudibleListener membership programs for 12 months. The US$14.95 per month BasicListener program offers the choice of any one of Audible’s 6,000 audiobooks each month, as well as a one-month subscription to one of Audible’s subscription programs that range from daily audio digests of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times to Forbes magazine, Scientific American, and RobinWilliams@audible.com. Premium Listener gives you any two audiobooks for $19.95 per month, a savings of 60-85 percent compared to traditional audiobooks on cassette or CD, according to Korzen.
In July Apple announced support for Audible in its iPod digital device. Macworld Magazine also announced in July its weekly Macintosh Audible program.