Help Me Out, Folks!

I am an advocate of audiobooks. I've always wished I read more, even as a child. My lifestyle has always been just too active for books. Many people, when they learn this, express surprise at the knowledge. Apparently, I seem to others like a bookworm. Nope! Not I! Not because I don't like reading or what I can learn from reading, just that there always seems to be so many other things to do with one's day than sit around (even if one is improving their mind while sitting around).

Since I've started spending every spare moment with yarn in my lap and twisted around my fingers, my life has become many moments of sitting around. I'm ok with this, because I enjoy crocheting immensly, but something has to fill the void. I was spending a lot of time on hulu.com or watching any one of my DVD collection. But, one gets tired of sitting in a computer chair at work and then doing it some more at home (though I could take DVDs into the living room, Hulu had to stay on the computer).

Sunflyr gave me a compliment of audiobooks in mp3 format a while ago. They're great! But, I currently have them everywhere. I have the mp3s on my computer, I burn the current book to a CD so I can listen in my car, and I load them to my mp3 player so I can listen at work if I happen to have an hour or so to do that. It generally still plants me in front of the computer when I'm working with my yarn, as my mp3 player is an ancient beast of a thing that, I'm very sorry to say, is on it's last legs (sound only comes through one earpiece). And, eventually, I'll get through all these books that my roommate gave me and I'll need a source for more.

So, I was thinking of getting a subscription to audible.com. I can still listen to files on my computer, I can still record them to CD. But my ancient, beast of an mp3 player is not compatible with Audible files. Basically, if I go with the Audible option, I can only listen on the computer or in the car with a CD (because who has portable CD players anymore?). There is a plethora of things compatible with Audible files (for example, Amazon's Kindle is, while Sony's Reader is not), but I currently don't own any.

And, here I am!

Do any of you, gentle readers, love the power and freedom of audiobooks? Do you have an mp3 player or digital reader that you use for your books? I want to know! What service (Audible, purchase and rip your own, something else) do you use? What player do you have? I still have a few books to go through before I'm going to need more, but I'm looking into my options now.