guess what today's blog post is about?

Yup, walking and weight loss.

I think I'm going to make it so that I have 1 day a week where I do an update about the weight stuff, a bit like the mini reviews. At the very least I can give my pedometer readings for the past week (it has a 7-day memory function, which is pretty cool).

If I'm feeling very brave I might actually give my weight, which would tend to suggest Monday or Tuesday might be the best days to talk about it, since I'll be weighing myself at the weekend.

Anyway, the thing I wanted to mainly mention was my brilliant idea to help me walk - audio books. If you're unaware, an audio book is literally a regular book read out by someone and recorded. We're not really talking dramatization, though - think father reading story to child before bedtime, only not in a patronising way.

Having hit upon the idea, I therefore signed myself up to something called audible, which is a kind of talking-book shop (as opposed to a talking bookshop - that would just be weird) done by Amazon.

I went in with eyes open - I knew the audible site uses a DRM proprietary format which has a file extension of "aa". This potentially meant that I couldn't play it on my MP3 player, but I did the research and decided that if worse came to worst I could get around it by burning to CD and ripping it from there.

I mean, the audible system does have the advantage of allowing you as many downloads as you like and by installing their software you can play it from your computer, but this would hardly be a help for listening on the move. And besides, burning to CD means I will have hard copies that (I think) I can listen to in the car anyway.

Anyway, I tested it out this weekend and truth be told it's a bit of a faff, but it's a faff that only needs doing once per audio book, and I'm not going to be buying millions of them. So yeah, I can cope is how I'd put it.

One thing I did get a shock over was the price of the audio books - they're very expensive. In most cases they're more than 4 or 5 times the cost of buying the paperback version.

When I thought about this it made sense - you're not only paying for the story, like you are the normal book, but also there's all that expense of getting someone (or several someone's) in to read the thing, and that can only add to the price. And an unabridged version of a book can be very long. I recently talked about reading Matter and the unabridged audio book for that is nearly 18 hours long!

However, what audible does is it works a bit like the lovefilm rental service, in that every month you pay a subscription fee and that gives you a credit which you can use to get one book. The subscription fee is only about £8 (I think - I forget, plus it's discounted for the first few months) and that's a good chunk less than most of the books I've looked at. But not all - some were only about £5 (older and shorter stories) so those are going to be better to buy.