STOCKTON - Audio books just entered the digital age at the Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library.

Library patrons can choose from 1,300 books to which they might want to listen on their computers or on portable, digital music players. Unlike audio books on tape or compact disc, these books can be downloaded from home over the Internet. The library began offering the downloads June 21.

"It's a new way of getting material out to the public," said Christina Walter, administrative analyst at the library.

This is the library's first foray into delivering books through the Internet. It doesn't check out text versions of books online, but it does maintain a page on its Web site that links to other sites that provide both free and fee-based downloads of books, Walter said.

Under the new program, patrons can download the audio books to their computers and up to two portable audio devices, such as MP3 players, according to NetLibrary, the company that provides the subscription service to the library. Books can be "checked out" until the license that accompanies the file expires and the book becomes unusable after 21 days. Checkouts can be renewed to extend the time.

Library patrons have made good use of the library's audio books, possibly because many San Joaquin County residents have long commutes to out-of-county jobs, Walter said. In the past year, library users checked out 11,148 books on tape and 24,253 books on compact disc, she said.

MP3 players are portable devices most-commonly used for listening to music and can be attached to adapters that allow the devices to be played through car stereos. The devices have also become popular on radio-station and other Web sites as a means to deliver portable spoken-word content.

However, the computer files the county library uses to check out audio books are not compatible with Apple Computer's iPod, the dominant MP3 player, nor can they be listened to on Apple's Macintosh computers.

Libraries across the country have been adding audio books online for the past year, but the incompatibility with iPods has been a downside, said Leslie Burger, president of the American Library Association. But NetLibrary and the other major vendor that provide the service to libraries could change that, she said.

"I think it will eventually come," she said.

The incompatibility has to do with technology used to protect copyrights, according to NetLibrary.

Available titles include those by best-selling authors such as Dan Brown, whose "The Da Vinci Code" has spent many weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. That book is not available for download from the library, but another Brown best-seller, "Angels and Demons," is. "Everyman," the 2006 novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Roth, is also available through the library.

The recitation of the American classic "Moby Dick," by Herman Melville, takes more than 21 hours to hear, according to the NetLibrary profile of the audio book. The file takes up 250 megabytes of hard-drive space, but users can opt for a lower-quality recording in a file one-tenth that size.

When Kathleen Morrow, 52, of Tracy listens to books on CD, she sticks to fiction. She hadn't heard of the new offering at the library, but she said she likes the idea of being able to download audio books from home.

"I'll do that," she said. "Some (audio books) are not that cheap. You can pay 20, 30 or 40 bucks for those."

Contact reporter Zachary K. Johnson at (209) 833-1142 or zjohnson@recordnet.com

The Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library offers access to audio books that can be downloaded to home computers. Here's how to do it:

• Get a library card.
• Click on the eAudiobooks banner at the top of the library's Web page, www.stockton.lib.ca.us.
• Click "set up your account" to register for your account at NetLibrary.com.
• Make sure your computer has the correct software, such as Microsoft Windows Media Player version 9 or above.
• Search for the book you want to hear.
• Click the link to start downloading.