LGR Oddware - Audible MobilePlayer from 1997 (Patreon)

Fresh Oddware for ya! This time it's the MobilePlayer from Audible, a digital spoken word player from 1997. Yes, the same Audible known for audiobooks these days. Yet this is from the days of 28.8k dial-up modems and predates the first mass-market MP3 players. And it wasn't even sold in stores, the only way you could get one was by ordering directly from the company!

And it holds a whopping two hours of audiobooks! By compressing everything down to 8-bit 8kHz sound files that are stored on four megabytes of flash memory, ha. But for real, this thing is pretty impressive for how forward-thinking its ideas are. Arguably too much so, seeing as very few units were sold and it wasn't long before the company decided that hardware-agnostic content distribution was the future.

So yeah, I've this one in the works since before E3 and Computer Reset, but obviously other projects have taken precedence. Still quite happy with how this one came together and I'm curious to hear how many people even remember this thing or used Audible in the '90s at all. Hope you enjoy!