Series 60 and Audible Audio Books

I’ve subscribed to Audible a couple of months ago to download audio books instead of buying them from Amazon ,listening to them, and afterwards selling them on eBay. The only problem with their service is the DRM protection of the audio files. As there was no player available for Series 60 devices available that work with Audible, I had to burn the audio books on CD and  rip them from there into MP-3 format (I refuse to carry my 6680 and a MP-3 player!!!). Tiresome work, especially for 20 hour audio books which require 16 CDs. Nevertheless, I still prefer that to Amazon/eBay buying selling which also requires the MP3 ripping to put them on my mobile phone.

Now it seems Audible has recently launched ‘Audible Air‘ for Series 60 devices. Great application, it loads the audio books right over the network into the phone. However, you should have an unlimited data plan for this  (we are talking about 200 MB for a 20h audio book) whichi s unfortunately not yet offered for a reasonable price in Germany. So I was looking for a way to move the audio files from my PC to the phone and import it into the application as the link above mentions that this is possible. Zip, nada, nothing… The application just doesn’t want to recognize the files. On top, there is no manual for the application on Audible’s web site so I can’t even verify if I did something wrong.

So what’s the point in developing an S60 application that insists that it only wants to have the data over the air? It will be a nice feature in a year or two when unlimited data plans are a common thing… I am somewhat dissapointed.