This is a suggestion for someone who is real smart and has nothing to do

Look into the Audible Air program.

Lots of Nokia tablet users are frustrated because they can't install Audible.com books on their tablets and listen to them. This is because Audible is very Windows-centric, I guess. But since I got a Treo a few days ago, I discovered that with Audible Air, the Palm stuff works GREAT with Audible Air. It's like having a Kindle for audiobooks; you can download any book you purchased from Audible in a very short time anywhere your cell phone works.

So, since Palm software works with Nokia tablets, you'd think there would be a way to give Nokia tablet users the same capabilities. (Except no cell phone, of course.)

If you go to the audible.com site and look around for information about using audible stuff on Palms you can find more details.

I suppose the problem would be that the Audible Air program is proprietary, but there might be a ray of hope there somehow...

Tried it. The current (Beta 2) GVM can't handle the Palm Audible Client. Will try again at Beta 3

I'd like to suggest that anyone who wishes that Audible would support the Nokia N8xx platform should let them know. Send in a support request. You are a subscriber, let them know what you want. I plan to ditch Audible if they do not get rid of their crappy DRM soon. There are several audiobook sites now that use mp3 without DRM.

Audible pays no attention to customer requests, in my experience of six years as a high-paying customer of theirs.

That's why I am no longer their customer. But I still have all those audio files I bought, which Audible Air could help me use on my N800.

If you can't install from there why not try out a different site for audio books? I believe that is what the concern is here. If not then I apologize for throwing the conversation off topic.

I found that the current beta 3 (1.02b) would run the Audible Air software provided it was installed from memory card and not by hot sync. I could even download some books. The problem was the the gvm would crash consistently corrupting the virtual disk making the system unusable. I believe that the current beta 3 expires at the end of March 2009, so hopefully the next beta will be more stable.

I have a ton of Audible books that I have purchased over the years. I used to use a Toshiba e750 wm2003 pocketpc to listen to them. But then I switched to a creative Zen vision M, which supports audible. But I wanted to listen to them on my N800 which is my main device now. So I do this... I use my Windows PC with the Audible s/w to burn them to cd's. Actually, I burn them to CD images and not real cd's. Then mount the cd images using PowerIso and then I use Windows Mediaplayer to rip the cd's into mp3 format. Voila, no more DRM and I can play them on my N800. Not sure if this is legal but I bought the audiobooks so I should be able to listen to them on whatever device I want. Plus, I'm protected in case Audible ever goes bellyup and I can't 'activate' my audible player anymore. I hate DRM because a few years ago I bought music from MSN Music store , they went bellyup, and then I wasn't able to play those songs anymore. That won't happen to me anymore.

Take a look at Tunebite. I plays the legally bought DRMed file and records it to DRM-free MP3 at the same time.

A second alternative is Fu4Wm, but I'm not shure if its legal. It finds the key of your legally bought audio files and decrypts them without any quality loss.

The reason is that none of the other sites have equivalent prices or selection, and some of us already own lots of Audible books and don't want to rebuy the same books from another source.

By the way, since Audible books play on Kindles, which are based on Linux, they could be made to play in other Linux environments. I mentioned this to Audible and they didn't reply, which is typical of them. Audible is now owned by Amazon, I heard -- that accounts for their Kindle friendliness.

Might I also recommend the free alternative, http://www.podiobooks.com? This site has hundreds of books from different authors includingJ C Hutchins, Scott Sigler and Basil Sands. All of the content on this site is free, and I have enjoyed hours of stories from here, and IMHO, it blows the tar out of audible.

--vr