I spent about 20 minutes this evening walking a patron through downloading a book from the State Library of Kansas‘s new audiobook service, OneClickdigital, to his iPod–a task that isn’t quite as easy as the service’s name makes it sound. What made it even more complicated was the fact that the reference transaction took place over the phone. A part of me can now sympathize with those phone tech support guys. The gentleman, who had one of those smooth southern accents, first expressed concern that he was going to have to create another account because he thought he may have done something to deactivate his first one. I managed to determine that he was still logged in and then proceeded to direct him through the downloading process.

He wasn’t able to tell me whether or not he had installed the media manager on his computer, so I had to walk him through the manual download process. To enable the manual downloads, you first have to go in to your account preferences and make sure the OneClickdigital media manger isn’t the default player. After we got that taken care of, I was able to direct him to his list of checked out items where he could click a link that would initiate the download. Now the file that downloads is actually a .zip folder, and decompressing it was another process the patron was unfamiliar with. I also had to walk him through adding the folder to his iTunes library, and then he was finally at the point where he could successfully transfer the book to his device.

I’m not a big fan of audiobooks, so I probably won’t be using the service all that often myself, but I’m glad I have the experience and know-how to help others with it. The patron was honest with me and told me it was a little too complicated and that he probably wouldn’t be downloading audiobooks too often. He isn’t the first patron to make such an observation and claim, so I understood how he felt. I assured him, though, that he could always call back and we could walk him through the process again.