Playaway Audio Book: A Very Basic Audio Player
Playaway audio books are a new format that is spoken-word recordings that can play themselves. Each Playaway audio book, in essence, is a very basic audio player that is no larger than a cassette tape and has a fixed memory that has a single audio tone. The Playaway audio book is accompanied with a cheap headphone, a lanyard as well as sufficient AAA batteries to allow one to listen to the complete book. The cost is no more than an ordinary unabridged CD book that one can purchase on the market. A normal best seller may cost fewer than fifty dollars and run for as many as twelve hours or a bit more. According to Playaway, the player can operate for twelve hours on a single battery; hence, there will usually be two accompanying batteries with the audio player. The amount of compression of the Playaway audio book may not be immediately apparent, but the device does come with typical control buttons as well as one that inserts bookmarks, as also a tiny LCD that allows one to see where in the book one is currently at.
Things to Consider
The Playaway audio books are dedicated to playing of a single book and it is not possible to connect anything except for the headphones, and thus one cannot transfer audio in or out. The primary target audience could be non-geeks because the geeks would certainly be found downloading or ripping downloadable titles to digital form. Also, the Playaway audio book does not require a PC or an Mp3 player and because of its tiny size, it can tuck into a pocket and thus is much simpler than having to deal with a portable CD or tape player. But, with the costs of memory as well as electronics coming down, the Playaway audio book is no longer able to command a premium position over the CD version, and one can also expect further innovations in the near future that will provide further competition.
There is also the fact, that presently, there is not much variety in the number of Playaway audio book titles available, and one can maybe get lucky if one finds more than thirty to forty titles. The product itself can be considered wasteful since the CD, digital music files as well as tapes are other viable options that can provide similar service. They are however, quite useful for visually handicapped persons and also for non-geek users who prefer to have their books read out to them.