Every winter I budget a few hundred dollars to buy myself a present. One winter I bought a touring bicycle. Another, I bought an iBook ("the best foolish purchase I've ever made" I said at the time; it's still true). Last year I bought a Nintendo Gamecube.

This year I joined Audible.

Over the past four months, I've listened to a dozen audiobooks. I've borrowed each of these from the library system, thereby exercising fiscal responsibility. This is well and good — and I'll continue to do so — but a couple of problems have become apparent.

First, I am at the mercy of other library patrons; I often have to wait two or three or four weeks for an audiobook to be available. Second, compact discs are altogether inconvenient. It's nice to be able to listen to books on CD as I drive to and from work, but for all other purposes, I'd rather have the books in digital format.

Enter Audible. With Audible I can obtain audiobooks whenever I want them and in a digital format. Obviously, there's a danger that this could become very expensive.

Fortunately, Audible offers subscriptions. For about $20 per month, I can download two complete audiobooks of my choice. I've also signed up — at the cost of about $30/year per program — for This American Life and for Garrison Keillor's News From Lake Wobegon.

When I joined in mid-December, I was able to purchase an iPod mini for only $150 (which is 40% less than normal — I don't know if this deal is still around), thereby giving me a portable listening device. (Kris has taken our other iPod into the lab, where she uses it all the time.)

Now I have an iPod mini, something I swore I would never own. "It's a rip-off," I said. "Only four gigabytes? For another $50 I could have a twenty gigabyte iPod." This is true. But I've come to realize that with the iPod mini, you're paying for the form factor, not the storage. And you know what? This device is tiny. It's perfect for porting my audiobooks out in the yard or to the gym or on long walks.

Now I've just got to start working in the yard or going to the gym or taking long walks.

Bonus: One brownie point to the first person who can guess which was the first audiobook I downloaded from Audible. (This shouldn't be difficult for regular readers. There's really only two options; one, if you think about it.)

Now that I'm a confirmed audiobook consumer, I'm open to recommendations from others who listen to books. I'd love to hear about not only good books, but especially good readers. I'm quite fond of Patrick Tull, who reads the Patrick O'Brien novels, and plan to download everything I can from him. Are there other readers I ought to hear?

On this day at foldedspace.org

2003 — Drifting, Falling   The day of the Challenger explosion, I wrote a poem. It's a typical sophomoric teenage effort, but it Dad liked it. Why doesn't the loss of the Columbia affect me in the same way?

2002 — Printers and MP3s   I want a small, cheap wearable mp3 player, one perfectly suited for using in the gym.