Eric J. Gruber

Last week, I purchased Seth Godin’s new (audio) book “The Dip” from Apple’s iTunes Store.

I love audiobooks. I’m always on the go, and I can just pop on one my iPod, put my headphones on and get educated. But there’s some sort of glitch with the iTS version of “The Dip,” and mine won’t play on my iPod - only on my computer.

It’s not just me. Hundreds of people have written to let Godin know about the problem. And now, a week later, it’s still not resolved.

Godin posted about the persistent problem today on his blog, and had this today …

“If the head of the iTunes store focused on this problem for ten seconds, it would go away.”

Oh man, talk about hitting the nail on the head. Someone from Apple could easily look at what is going on and realize what needed to be done to resolve it. Instead, when you write Apple (as I did), you’ll be told to check this documentation and that documentation, and if all that doesn’t work, you might need to call Apple (for a fee).

This isn’t typical of Apple, but as much as I talk about how great they are, I surely have to fault them when they screw up.

I will say that for those who purchased the book and have the same problem, I found a workaround.

• Burn the audiobook to multiple CDs in iTunes (you’ll need two of them)
• Import those tracks into iTunes
• Open those tracks into an audio editor of your choice (like Quicktime Pro)
• Do some splicing and merge all the tracks into one
• Convert the one track to the audio format of your choice in iTunes and put on your iPod

That solution worked great for me, plus, I ended up removing the silly DRM by making an mp3 of the book. It’s too bad someone at Apple didn’t think of it.