Aldoblog » Audiobooks

Getting the British Harry Potter eBooks and Audiobooks

Alderete — Tue, 08 May 2012 16:09:56 +0000

With the launch of the store at Pottermore.com, it’s now possible to get digital versions of all seven Harry Potter novels.

I own all of the audiobooks twice over, and several of the printed books, but the eBooks represent something new: the chance to read the British version of the novels. Alas, due to insanely complicated—and insanely stupid—international publication rights and restrictions, and my credit card’s USA billing address, the Pottermore.com store did not want to allow me to buy the UK version of the books.

Here’s how I bought them anyway. (You can do the same for the audiobooks, too.)

The basic trick is that I bought a gift for a “friend” who lives in the UK. Buying a gift allows (or in theory requires) you to purchase the edition appropriate for the gift recipient, rather than restricting you to the edition you are allowed to buy. And since your “friend” is redeeming a gift credit, they don’t need to enter a billing address that gets verified (or not) by a credit card transaction.

The only “tricky” part is that you need to have two email addresses, one for you (the buyer) and one for your “friend” (the gift recipient). Many people have a home and a work email, but as long as you have one, it’s not hard to get a second on one of the different webmail services (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.).

The full walk-through of the process is pretty damn tedious, you have to create Pottermore.com accounts for both you and your “friend”, but in the end I turned my $62 American dollars into all seven British edition eBooks, and they work great on my iPad (and well enough on my iPhone). I’m very much looking forward to re-reading the books again, with the Philosopher’s Stone and “colours” and “chips” (fries) and “biscuits” (cookies) and “snogging” (PDA) and all the rest of the wonderful English language in which the books were originally written.

If you’ve wanted to listen to the magnificent Stephen Fry narrated versions of the books, but balked at the £240 price plus international shipping charges from Amazon.com UK, this is your opportunity to save quite a bit of money. To say nothing of instant gratification!

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On Sale at Audible: Takeshi Kovacs Trilogy

Alderete — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 19:29:52 +0000

Only for the next two days, and only for Audible.com members, but the deal is so good, I feel compelled to share this collection of three hard-edged science fiction novels, Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies. I really enjoyed all three novels, and hope the author will return to the Envoy universe and write more of Kovacs’s story.

All three novels, unabridged, 55+ hours of audiobook, for $25 — less than $9 per novel, under 50¢ per hour! (Even when the sale ends on June 14th, this bundle will still be a nice deal.)

Audiobook Builder 1.5

Alderete — Mon, 30 May 2011 23:42:10 +0000

My recommended solution for creating digital audiobooks from CDs, Audiobook Builder, has recently been updated, and comes with a new feature for renaming the chapters in an audiobook:

I don’t know that I’d want to use this on every book, but for those without interesting or meaningful chapter names (or if you’re just not as anal retentive as I am), this can be a nice time savings to make your chapter titles look neat and regular. This is especially useful if you’re creating a separate track for every chapter, and want to keep chapters in the right order. (I recommend a different approach, but it’s up to you.)

Other new features include additional metadata support, something that’s very welcome. All in all, a great update — and free to registered users!

Free download of Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Alderete — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 04:11:20 +0000

For a limited time, you can download a free audiobook of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden read by Mel Foster. This is the commercial version of the book, which retails for $23-33.

The unabridged audiobook is provided as MP3 files, which you can simply drag into iTunes, and then sync to your iPod or iPhone for listening. You can change their Media Kind to have iTunes treat them as audiobook tracks, or with a little more work, you can convert them to a single audiobook file.

Note: If you don’t already have one, you will need to create an account on Tantor Media’s site, which will sign you up for their newsletter where, among other things, you can learn about future free downloads.

Which iPod Should I Buy, 2010 Edition

Alderete — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 21:22:13 +0000

Two years in the making, or just two years late. At long last I’ve updated the article describing recommended devices for listening to audiobooks:

Which iPod Should I Buy for Listening to Audiobooks

Hopefully this will be useful to you during your holiday shopping! (And come back for my Recommended Audiobooks when you find a new toy under the tree for yourself, that’s getting a huge update soon.)

App Review: Audible Audiobook Player

Alderete — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 20:13:43 +0000

If you search the App Store for “audiobook” you turn up hundreds of results, most of which are crap. (More on that in a future post.) Separating the wheat from the chaff can be a challenge. Aldo on Audiobooks will only bother to review worthwhile apps.

My favorite source for audiobooks is Audible.com, an online service offering over 85,000 digital downloads of audiobooks and other spoken word content (more here). This summer Audible released the Audible audio player app, dedicated to playing Audible content and interacting with the Audible.com service directly, without requiring the use of a computer or iTunes. The app is free, but requires the use of an Audible.com account.

The short version of this review is, if you’re an Audible customer with an iOS device, getting this free app is a no-brainer. It’s intuitive and optimized for audiobooks, it plays in the background just like the built-in iPod app, it adds useful features not in the built-in iPod app, and its design is clean, simple, tasteful. I’ve used it exclusively for audiobooks for the last four months, and it’s a great replacement for the iPod app. I plan to continue using it indefinitely. I still use the iPod app for podcasts and non-Audible audiobooks, and regularly miss Audible app features.

The Audible app has three major functions:

Browse and search your Audible library.

In addition to book title, you can browse content by author and by recent activity (purchase, download, playback). Searches can be on author, title, narrator, or all three. If you have a lot of audiobooks, you will realize immediately how big an improvement this is over the built-in iPod app. I normally keep 30-40 titles on my iPhone, but I have more than 275 titles in my Audible library (I’ve been a customer for 7 years). The new ways to browse are a godsend.
Download titles to your iPhone (or iPod Touch, or any iOS device).

The Audible app allows you to download audiobooks directly to your device, without needing to connect to your computer. (You do need to be connected to a Wi-Fi network, as virtually any audiobook will be greater than the 10 megabyte limit for 3G downloads.) Browse to an item, and tap the download button, it couldn’t be easier. This is a fantastic feature for people who have difficulty getting iTunes to sync the way they want it to, and it’s great for making last-minute decisions about what to listen to, without needing to break out your laptop.
Play your audiobooks.

The app features a slew of specialized navigation controls that are specific to longer, linear spoken word content, including a no-look mode for controlling playback while driving. Particularly useful features include a “skip back 30 seconds button” that is larger than in the iPod app, dedicated chapter navigation buttons, an integrated sleep timer, and the ability to create bookmarks at any point in a recording. Overall, audiobook playback is easier and more obvious than with the iPod app.

Other Features

The app additionally includes a number of smaller features worth noting. There is a news tab, with notes about upcoming releases, insider notes, author appearances, awards, and other audiobook news. A stats tab shows you various statistics about your listening habits, and even allows you to earn badges for specific behaviors, like binge listening, listening all night, and so on. You can bookmark specific spots in a recording and take notes on it, much like you can with the Bookmark app I reviewed previously. And there are various things you can email or post to Twitter or Facebook, if you want to share with others. Finally, the shop tab serves as a launch pad for switching to the Safari browser and accessing the mobile-optimized version of the Audible.com web site.

I won’t bore you with additional details; if you want to see more, Audible has written a very good user manual for the app, which you can download in PDF format. (This is more useful than built-in help, since if you don’t have an Audible.com account, you can’t really play with the app directly.) Don’t let the manual intimidate you; it is almost entirely unnecessary, because the app is so intuitive, differing from the iPod app only in ways that make sense for the purpose of the app.

Notes and Limitations

Content downloaded inside the Audible app is not added to your on-board iPod library, or synced back to iTunes, but is instead stored in the app’s data storage area. If you want the content in iTunes, you’ll have to download it separately, on your computer.
The app can play Audible content from your standard iTunes library, that you sync to your device as usual using iTunes, but it is treated as a slightly second class citizen, losing the ability to skip to built-in chapter marks. This doesn’t have to be a big deal, but it’s irritating. And when you combine this with the first issue, the two distinct libraries have the potential to create a collection management problem down the line.
In the four months I’ve used it, the app has crashed on me a few times, over multiple versions. But, it has never lost my place in a book or a download. Just restart the app, and continue where you were.
I’ve noticed issues with author names not always being properly grouped. For example, I found my Michael Connelly books in three groups, and my Lois McMaster Bujold titles in seven different groups. This looks like minor whitespace or spelling discrepancies in the Audible data. These are not problems with the app per se, but rather with the audiobook database and metadata on the Audible.com site. There were also occasional encoding issues on foreign names, e.g., Per Wahlöö & Maj Sjöwall, and this probably is an app issue.
Shopping in the store is a bit awkward, involving a swap out to Safari, where you browse a version of the web site optimized for mobile devices. (I suspect this is a limitation due to Apple’s terms for selling in the iTunes Store.) On the mobile version of the site, I can’t access the My Next Listen queue, which is where I personally store my “real” wish list. (The wish list, which is accessible, is where I keep my “maybe someday” list.) You can switch to the full site, and it’s usable in mobile Safari. Minor awkwardness aside, it is useful to be able to make purchases from your phone.

Summary

Version Reviewed: v1.3, released September 20th, 2010

If you are an Audible.com customer and have an iPhone or iPod Touch, get this app right now. You will end up loving it. It makes downloading and listening to your Audible content easier, even to the point of cutting your computer out of the loop.

Pluses:

Integrated, soup-to-nuts experience for Audible content.
Terrific controls and user interface for audiobooks.
News, stats and badges are fun.

Minuses:

Audible only.
Separation of app audiobooks library and standard iTunes library.
Minor glitches.

More Information:

Audible player in the App Store
Audible app web page
Audible mobile apps web page (for Blackberry & Android)

Editorial Note

The Audible app is free, but the Audible.com service is not. I pay for my Audible subscription myself. I have added affiliate links to products mentioned in this review, but only after writing the review. Affiliate relationships have not affected the content of this review in any way.

Free download of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Alderete — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 02:28:42 +0000

From now through Halloween, you can download a free audiobook of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein read by Simon Vance. Vance is an extraordinary narrator, winner of many awards, and certainly a Golden Voice. This is a high-quality production.

Audiobook Builder for $5!

Alderete — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 08:05:13 +0000

Audiobook Builder, my recommended solution for creating audiobooks from CDs, is on sale for 50% off ($5), for one day only. The sale ends at the end of the day, February 11th, at midnight Eastern Time.

I consider Audiobook Builder a bargain at its full price of $10. At $5, it’s a steal. Go get it! (Audiobook Builder is for Mac OS X only.)

App Review: Recorded Books Audiobook Apps

Alderete — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:36:15 +0000

In my review of the Bookmark iPhone app, I noted that for the long tracks of an audiobook, the standard controls of the iPod app, optimized for 3 minute music tracks, can be frustrating. Bookmark is one solution to this issue. Another comes in the form of self-contained audiobook apps from Recorded Books.

These audiobook apps are found in the App Store section of iTunes, rather than in the Audiobooks section. You are buying not merely the audio portion of the audiobook, but also an app that will play it back. Indeed, you can only play the audiobook from its dedicated app; you cannot use the iPod app, or Bookmark, etc.

These apps are the iPhone equivalent of the Playaway format: player and book baked into a single device. The idea is to make an audiobook as easy to use as a regular book — a single (physical, for the Playaway) object that you pick up and take with you, no other items needed. The self-contained audiobook app makes the experience of buying an audiobook, getting it onto your iPhone, and playing it simple and straightforward. In theory.

The experience goes like this. After you have purchased the app and synched it to your iPhone, you will find the app’s icon on one of your home screens (here, the bottom left corner, above the Phone app). For the high-quality commercial books, the app’s icon is a miniature version of the book cover, a nice way to spot the book easily. (On the other hand, if your home screens are anywhere near as crowded as mine, giving each book a spot on them would be a serious organization issue.)

When you first launch the app, it will flash the book cover, and then go to the main app screen, which is fixed in landscape view, and begin playing the book:

Only the first chapter of the audio is included in the app itself; when you start the app, the rest of the audio will be downloaded automatically, in the background. You can only listen to parts that have finished downloading. The app can (apparently) download parts over a WiFi, 3G, and even EDGE connections. I write apparently because it gave no warning when I was downloading on a slower connection, and simply allowed it. While I experienced timeouts on non-WiFi connections, there is no way to know if this is inherent to the app, or if I was just getting a bad mobile connection in my house (AT&T in San Francisco is notorious).

Feedback about the download consists of text progress messages, “Part 2 of 54”, alternating with an estimated time remaining (though I saw estimates only while on WiFi, never for slower connections). Depending on the length of the book and the speed of your connection, downloading could take 20 minutes, or hours. If you are sitting in your easy chair listening to the book, the background downloading is unobtrusive and won’t bother you at all. But be sure to plan ahead if you’re expecting to listen to your book on a plane, or where you otherwise won’t have a connection. And understand that downloading only occurs while the app is running, and only while your device is “awake.”

Controlling Playback

The app controls for play/pause, skip backward and forward, and volume are obvious and intuitive, in box #3:

The skip buttons take you backwards or forwards by 30 seconds, probably the most useful interval for a skip button. The progress meter in box #2 is a slider that allows you to drag the playback point to any position in the current chapter. Less obvious, you can drag through the table of contents, box #1, and clicking a chapter title takes you to that chapter. Very nice. These controls allow you to easily reach any point in the book with just a few clicks or drags.

There is a sleep timer, which can be set to turn off the book after 15 or 30 minutes, and a playback speed button, to allow you to play the book at 1x or 2x speed (box #4). The double-speed playback is clear and understandable, but loses some of the nuance in the narrator’s performance. If you’re in a hurry to finish a book for a reason (due date, book club meeting, etc.), go for it, but otherwise, hey, this is supposed to be enjoyable, why are you trying to make it end faster?

The user interface is attractive, and in terms of layout, very well designed. If it were not all crammed onto one screen, it would be terrific. Unfortunately, the main playback control buttons are too small, and it’s very easy to hit the wrong button even when giving the screen your full attention. It would be impossible to control while driving a car without dangerous distraction.

The two halves of the screen, table of contents and the main playback controls, should be separated onto individual screens and enlarged, with controls for moving back and forth between them. This would be easy to do, and would give you a way to use the app in portrait (normal) orientation, too. Some performance optimizations would be good; I found the interface to occasionally be somewhat sluggish, which made the small buttons doubly irritating, because it was not clear if it was because I missed the button, or because the app was slow in responding.

Finally, the worst controls issue for me: the start/stop button on my Apple headphones do not work to control the audiobook playback (instead, it starts/stops the iPod app). This is a killer, because the button on the headphones is the main way I stop playback of a book when I’m ready to go to sleep, or need to talk to someone, etc., because it’s much faster to reach than to unlock the iPhone, find the right screen, and hit the stop button.

Audiobook Playback

The recording quality is fine. There’s no way to tell what the files are encoded as (at least, not without technical digging that’s more trouble than it’s worth for this review). From listening it seems to be roughly equivalent to Audible’s Type 4 format, which is pretty good (I have listened to dozens of books in Type 4 format), but I now prefer Audible’s Enhanced format, which has twice the audio resolution, and sounds noticably better, even to my poor ears.

More seriously, you can only listen to the audiobook while you are in the app. There is no background playback, so you can’t e.g. switch to Bejeweled to play a game or three while listening. If you leave the app, the audiobook stops. Period.

There is no bookmarking capability. The app saves your position in the book when you stop playback or exit the app, just like the iPod app, but otherwise you can’t save locations in the book. There is no way to take notes about the book while you’re listening, and you can’t even exit the app to use the Notepad app. If you need to take notes on the book, it’s back to pencil and paper.

A few more minor notes.

The audiobook I tested, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, was $14.99 as an application, and $19.99 as a standard audiobook. The master recording for each is the same, the only difference is the format, app or audio track. Both are a good value (the book is over 21 hours long, less than $1/hour), but the app is $5 cheaper.
There is a very limited selection of audiobooks in app format, a dozen or so quality commercial recordings, and a few dozen more which package the less polished LibriVox recordings of books which are in the public domain. Also, audiobook app entries on the iTunes store often neglect to give details about the recording, like if it’s abridged or unabridged, length, who the narrator is, etc. All standard stuff when you look at regular audiobooks.
Audiobooks purchased as apps present organization issue. As noted above, they go into the Applications list, not Audiobooks, in the iTunes library. There are fewer viewing options for apps, and a much lower limit on number of apps you can put simultaneously on an iPhone (though practically speaking, the real limit is storage space, not app slots). More seriously, audiobook apps can’t be in smart playlists, which I use extensively to manage which audiobooks are on my iPhone at any given time, and for other organization and management tasks.
I experienced a problem where I could not get the app to load; it would crash back to the home screen after a few seconds. Rebooting my iPhone didn’t fix the issue. I had to delete the app, reload it, and redownload the book’s audio to be able to get back to my book. That would suck if I had been on an airplane.

Summary

Version reviewed: v1.0

If you are new to audiobooks, these self-contained recordings are a great way to try them out. The self-contained recording is cheaper, and the dedicated audiobook controls make it easier to enjoy your first audiobook, without having to learn the escoteric iPod app controls that you need to know to keep from being frustrated when playing the long tracks of a standard audiobook.

But if you are an experienced audiobook listener, especially if you have been listening to them on your iPod for a while, you will probably find these audiobook apps extremely frustrating. Although the lower price is tempting, you will almost certainly be happier in the long run continuing to buy standard audiobooks. I personally found listening to a novel in this format to be quite frustrating. (But then, I’m an expert on the “right” way to do it.)

Summary of the summary: good for beginners, bad for experts.

Pluses:

Simple controls are easier to figure out than built-in iPod app controls for handling long audiobook tracks.
Easy access (no need to find the Audiobooks section in the iPod app).
Less expensive than standard audiobook.

Minuses:

Controls are too small, and sometimes sluggish.
No background playback.
Requires time and planning ahead to download audio.
Cannot use standard iTunes tools to organize a larger collection.
Frankly, for true beginners, a real Playaway audiobook is a better bet.

More Information:

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle app, $14.95
Other Recorded Books apps

Editorial Note

I paid for my own copy of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, and I received no compensation for this review. I add affiliate links to products mentioned on this site. I only add such links after writing, and they don’t influence what I write about.

App Review: Bookmark

Alderete — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:03:03 +0000

Bookmark is an alternative audio player dedicated to audiobooks, based on the insight that the iPod is great for music, but not very well-suited to audiobooks. Bookmark was designed around the central concept that, when listening to a long audiobook, you want different controls for moving around in the much longer tracks, and tools for marking positions in the recording that go beyond just saving where you left off. If you’ve ever listened to a long audiobook track on an iPod, and especially if you’ve ever thought “I want to go back and hear that part again,” you know what this is all about.

Using Bookmark is simple. Start the app, choose a book from the list of titles (Bookmark filters out everything but audiobooks), and press play. In this regard, Bookmark is much like the built-in iPod app. The basics of playback are pretty obvious, with standard controls for play/pause, volume control, and track progress.

Where Bookmark begins to differentiate itself is with the “Time Ribbon” controller, which is a very simple and clever way to skip forward or backward in a track, in increments of 30 seconds, 1, 5, 15, or 30 minutes.

This is a precise method of jumping around in an audiobook, that is more approachable and discoverable than scrubbing in the standard iPod app. If you’ve ever been frustrated trying to go backwards by a minute or two, or dozed off listening to a book in bed, this is for you.

“Heads Up” mode is terrific for listening while driving, when you cannot spare your attention to control the iPod app, or even Bookmark in normal mode. An iPhone or iPod touch normally demands that you look at it to control it, because there are no physical buttons to feel your way around. In Heads Up mode the controls are simplified to only two swipe gestures, which are easy to accomplish without taking your eyes off the road: up and down to pause and resume playback, and side to side to skip forward or backward 15 seconds. This mode could literally save your life. It is the only safe method I know to control a touch-based iPod while driving, unless you have physical controls built into your car stereo or iPhone mount.

The other major difference from the built-in iPod app is the app’s namesake: bookmarks. It’s easy to figure out how to set a new bookmark (though the bookmark editing panel could be simpler). You can create as many bookmarks as you like, give them meaningful names, and add notes to bookmarks, perhaps to remind you of why you saved that position. You can also save notes on the book (track) itself. It is possible to send yourself (or anyone) saved bookmarks and notes via email; this is the only way to export this information from the app.

Like the built-in iPod app, Bookmark can play audiobooks in the background, so you can use another app (say, Bejeweled) while listening. This goes beyond just backgrounding; you can actually switch to the iPod app, and control the audio from there using the standard UI, and then switch back to Bookmark, and use its controls. Switching back and forth is seamless, never pausing or stuttering audio playback.

Bookmark does have a few modest flaws that you should be aware of:

I dislike the current visual design of the application. Textured backgrounds and non-standard buttons are mixed with standard iPhone controls. While there are some applications which have successfully departed from the iPhone platform UI standards, it takes a strong visual designer to carry it off. Bookmark 1.1 does not, but I have seen a mockup of a forthcoming version, and it looks fantastic. Something to look forward to.
The bookmarking interface needs some work. You should be able to simply tap into the Notes field, instead of needing to hit the Edit button. It would be nice to be able to hit the Next button to move from the bookmark name to the notes field. It’s usable, but this panel feels like a “rough draft” of what the developer eventually intends.
The current release has a few other user interface issues, which I expect to be resolved in the next release. The main player window is entirely reworked, resolving issues such as Heads Up mode being buried in the More panel, etc.
Unlike the iPod app, Bookmark does not combine multiple tracks from a single audiobook into a single entry in the titles list. This makes the list unnecessarily long, and is especially problematic for audiobooks which have many shorter tracks, such as from MP3 CDs or eMusic. For this reason, the developer currently recommends Bookmark only for audiobooks which come in long tracks, such as those from Audible or the iTunes Store. This issue is intended to be resolved in the next release.
There is no way to view or access existing chapter marks in an audiobook. This is no big deal for many audiobooks, which either don’t have chapter marks, or have them in silly places, but for those that do, it’s extremely irritating to not be able to use them. Unfortunately, this is a limitation of the iPhone SDK, so it’s in Apple’s hands to resolve.
The Time Ribbon controller, while very interesting, suffers from some implementation flaws. The biggest is that audio playback is immediately affected when you hit a skip level, which can be jarring. I think it would be better if the app waited until you let go of the controller to jump the appropriate distance. At the very least, a half- or quarter-second pause to see if you were moving past a skip level to a greater one would be a good idea.
While you can move back and forth between Bookmark and the built-in iPod app while a book is playing, unexpected position changes are almost inevitable if you do it when a book is not playing. This is because by default Bookmark stores its own Last Played position for each book, instead of sharing it with the iPod. (The alternative, sharing the position, has other issues, due to iPod app bugs that unset the Last Played position after syncing. Damned if you do…) The next release will have a work-around that should handle this better. In the mean time, you can avoid it by sticking exclusively with either Bookmark or the iPod app for your audiobooks.
Stability and glitches are an (occasional) issue. I crashed the application once, and encountered another oddity, where navigating from the current book to the list of titles whirred for a while, and then reported that I had no titles on my device yet (this is reportedly an iPhone OS bug). I’ve encountered incorrect cover art in the titles list and on the playback screen. And occasionally saving a bookmark would silently fail, requiring me to re-enter it.

To reiterate: these are all modest issues, and many of them should be resolved in the next release. Bookmark works well most of the time, and has no severe flaws.

Summary

Version reviewed: v1.1.1

Overall, Bookmark represents a useful tool for regular audiobook listeners, especially if you listen (and re-listen) actively, or are using a book as a reference or object of study. Being able to set more than one bookmark, and name and annotate them, is invaluable.

Bookmark is also great if the standard iPod playback controls frustrate you when listening to audiobooks. The Time Ribbon is extremely approachable and usable, and most people will like it better than the (non-obvious) scrubbing controls in the iPod app.

Heads Up playback mode is worth the price of the app all by itself, if you listen to books while driving alone.

Bookmark has a few flaws, but if you listen to audiobooks regularly, it is easily worth the $3 purchase price.

Pluses:

Innovative “Time Ribbon” controller.
“Heads Up” mode.
Multiple bookmarks and notes.
Can play audiobooks in background mode.

Minuses:

Non-standard UI, and occasional polish issues.
Cannot use or display embedded chapter marks. (SDK issue.)
Minor bugs and stability problems.

More Information:

Editorial Note

I paid for my own copy of Bookmark, and I received no compensation for this review. I did share a draft of this review with DockMarket, the developer of Bookmark. A “real” journalist would not do this, but I believed that getting feedback and a peek at the next release was more important than “pure” journalistic integrity.

Also note that I add affiliate links to products mentioned on this site. I only add such links after writing, and they don’t influence what I write about.