eAudiobooks—Gone!

In recent days, I have tried several times to download Pimsleur lessons, as I have done successfully multiple times before, in the form of eAudiobooks through the New York Public Library’s connection to NetLibrary. I couldn’t get the download to work, though, so today I finally wrote to the library to ask what was going on.

I ended up participating in a long online chat session with a library employee, involving lots of typing, and not so much information. (For the most part I find online customer-service chats to be singularly inefficient ways to obtain information.) The woman didn’t have an answer for me, but said she’d get back to me by e-mail, which I was skeptical about.

In fact, though, I did hear back from her later in the day, when she conveyed, without an appropriate level of pathos, I thought, the truly sad news that the service has been canceled. That means eAudiobooks of Pimsleur will no longer be available to me, or other New York Public Library patrons—only the CDs, which require an actual trip to the library and often simply aren’t available.

I promptly wrote to NetLibrary, which is a service of an organization called OCLC, and they told me how to search for another library that might still have this service. I’m not sure I can just sign up for another library in a place where I don’t live, but I might check it out.

Then again, maybe I’ll just try to get the CDs in time.