With release 3.0, Zune introduces support for audiobooks from market leader Audible.com, as well as Overdrive.com.

Today we’ll look at the Audible experience.

Audiobooks are not available directly from Zune Marketplace; instead you sign up and download your books from the Audible.com website. To sync your audiobooks to your player, you use Audible’s PC client software. We’re thinking that before long all of this will be controllable directly from Zune software.

Still, I found the process to be painless. Once you’ve signed up as an Audible subscriber, you can buy and download audiobooks as you normally would. The audiobook I downloaded was 8 hours and about 200MB.

Zune appears as a device in the Audible client software on your PC. Syncing the audiobook was startlingly fast – in fact, I didn’t believe it had synced until I disconnected my player and saw the audiobook loaded and ready to play.

Once you’ve synced an audiobook to a player, the audiobook option appears on the player’s main menu.

If you’re not yet an Audible subscriber, use this link to subscribe – it gives Zune users a 30-day free trial, in which you can download your choice of audiobook and try it out.

Zune treats audiobooks much like podcasts on your player. Here’s a shot of my downloaded audiobook – the current bestseller 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense. (You can also see the Your First Listen welcoming audiobook from Audible.)

Clicking on the desired audiobook gives you the options of resuming from where you last left off, or playing from the beginning. Zune doesn’t yet support “round-tripping” – i.e. synchronizing your “resume” spot between your PC and your player.

Fast-forward, reverse, play, pause and volume controls are available while playing an audiobook from the device.

This audiobook support is a welcome advance in Zune capabilities. We’ll look separately at Overdrive audiobook support, which is used widely by libraries and bookstores.

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