In Your Ears (Or Not)

I like audiobooks. No, really I do.

I've been trying to get my hands (ears?) on some so that I can actually do house work. I'm not talented enough to keep my eyes on a page and my hands on my work. But, it seems like the cosmic forces of the universe are trying to keep me from listening to a book.

Problem 1: I don't like listening to books with lots of swearing.

When I'm reading a book, I can skip over or fudge past the swear words, but in an audio, all I can do is listen. I don't want to hear lots of swearing. If I did, I'd head back to high school. So, I'm uncomfortable listening to certain types of books. This obviously limits my choices. Which weren't that broad in the first place (I get them from my rather limited library's selection).

Problem 2: I prefer not to check them out on CD or tape.

While I'm working around the house, my husband is usually doing homework. This makes it not very practical to have a book blaring through the house while he's trying to concentrate. But, I also don't want to haul around a portable CD or tape player. Fortunately, through our library system, we can check out and download audiobooks online (in several types of formats), which leads me to:

Problem 3: My computer and (rather outdated) mp3 player revolt against these downloaded books.

This is the most aggravating problem. I was trying to use the software that must be downloaded to listen to the books (which is its own annoying issue) and it wasn't recognizing the books I'd downloaded. That's a problem when the software that you have to have doesn't recognize the books it's designed to recognize. Sigh. It also would not load onto my mp3 player.

Eventually, we were able to work this out (after much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth), but I started to think I was not supposed to listen to audiobooks. And I started to not want to.

Here are my questions:

Am I just dealing with problems specific to me and my equipment?

Do you ever run into technical difficulties with your audiobooks?

Does it turn you off from listening to books if it isn't easy?