Thanks to a commenter over at Yglesias', I've been enjoying Oink's Pink Palace the last couple of days which, surprisingly, is not nearly as unpleasant as it sounds -- it's actually an audio torrent site. Prior to this I had written off BitTorrent as a source of music. To be honest, it's still a bit cumbersome -- it's less like a celestial jukebox than a celestial remainders bin. The upside, though, is that unlike Kazaa or Soulseek, Oink's has got a lot of audiobooks available, including a bunch of stuff from The Teaching Company. My dad's a big fan of TTC -- lately he's been working his way through their Great Philosophers series. Overall, the audiobook section is still a little spare, but I've managed to stumble across a torrents of stuff by Bukowski and John Searle next to pirated Lemony Snicket. So, like the rest of the internet, they get points for breadth, if not depth. And hey, how about a belated segue? There's also a torrent of a lecture debunking the Da Vinci Code.

I have to admit that I feel comparatively uneasy about downloading boutique content such as this. While I realize it's hardly a coherent moral philosophy, I intuitively feel better about downloading a copy of Alien Versus Predator than I do a copy of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. In the case of AvP, a lot better. I suppose the reason is that downloading a copyrighted work I respect tacitly discourages the production of content that I think is worthwhile, even if the download generally doesn't represent a lost sale. On the other hand, it's not like there's a looming shortage of recordings of college lectures. Hopefully outfits like AudioBooksForFree will be able to cajole note-taking-averse students and their professors into making their courses available on the web, following the trend set by folks like Christof Koch and, well, all of MIT.

Anyway, back to the morally troublesome present: if you click on the link to Oink's you'll notice that you've got to register with the site. That's a bit of a drag, especially considering that they don't seem to enforce up/down ratios, making the account system rather pointless. Still, the process is fairly painless.

Finally, this won't be of interest to most folks, but as the new owner of a 4G ipod, it seems cool to me: you can turn any audio file into an ipod-ready audiobook by following the instructions here (short version: make it an AAC, change the extension from 'm4a' to 'm4b'). The advantages to doing so are that 1) the file will start showing up in the audiobook section of your menus instead of the music area 2) the device will remember where you stopped listening and 3) you can use the nifty setting that lets you speed up or slow down the audiobook by 25% without affecting the pitch. Neat.