If late return fees have always put you off getting books from the library, the Central Pennsylvania Library District have found the answer. Members of their library need not worry about returning any books late, or losing them, or even having to make up an excuse such as their dog has eaten them. The reason is that Pennsylvania’s library is offering books on MP3 for patrons to take away with them on their MP3 players.

The audio books are downloadable from their website, and are completely free. The free MP3 books come in both fiction and non fiction titles, and are available from http://digitallibrary.centralpalibraries.org.

This means that the books can be listened to on computers, MP3 players or even burnt onto CDs.

The director of the Schlow Centre Region library, Betsy Allen, said:

We’re very excited about this service. We think this is a wonderfully modern and helpful service that people will embrace.

Members need to download the OverDrive Media Console program that allows them to access the audio books from the website, and they do also need to have a valid library card.

There are currently 200 titles available for download, including fiction titles in the thriller and romance genres.

One of the best things about digital music is the fact that there are countless websites offering free music downloads. The biggest problem with that is that the majority of those websites are illegal, meaning downloading the music and ripping it to your MP3 Player could land you in some very hot water.

However, not all of those websites are illegal, a great many offer you legitimate music for download, free of any rights complications and available for you to copy, listen to and share as you wish.

This past Monday, the Nine Inch Nails offered their latest album for download, in its entirety, completely free of charge from their official website NIN.com. The album is called ‘The Slip’ and features ten tracks. The download was accompanied on the website by a message from the Nine Inch Nails’ lead singer Trent Reznor:

Thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years — this one’s on me.

The band plan to release a hard copy of the album in stores this Summer, in July.

Their manager, Jim Guerino, said in an interview with Billboard.com:

Reznor has been in a prolific phase and we didn’t want ‘business’ to get in the way of getting the art in the hands of the fans.

You can download the album free of charge from the Nine Inch Nails website, complete with a PDF of lyrics.

This week, UK band Coldplay offered a free download of a track from their upcoming album. The song is called Volet Hill and was available from Tuesday this week, for one week only.

After the week’s free download has expired, the single will be released in stores. Before then, you can download the song here:

Coldplay’s new album, Viva La Vida, is available in June.

Following on from Coldplay’s free MP3 download; Metallica is considering making some music available as well, despite their well publicised troubles with former illegal download site Napster.

It seems that the opinion of bands on the whole music download phenomenon is changing from one of distrust, to one of embrace. They’re realising that digital music is a natural progression of the marketplace.

Radiohead famously offered their album as a ‘free’ download, where fans were invited to contribute what they wished for the album. While many did offer to pay for the download, a great many of Internet users downloaded the album without paying.

We can expect more musicians to follow suite and offer their work for free download via the Internet in the near future. It is fast becoming a medium that bands have to embrace, rather than fight against.

It’s one of the most anticipated games of all time, and if Rockstar’s previous efforts are anything to go by, it’ll be one of the best. Grand Theft Auto IV marks the first foray for the GTA range on the next gen consoles, and it’s a sure-fire winner.

One of the many selling points of the previous games, save for the senseless violence, massive arsenal of weapons, huge supply of vehicles and free reign within a city was the excellent range of music on offer. Indeed the music with the GTA series has been so good that it’s even had its own album release before.

For this new GTA game, players can download the music from game in MP3 format from Amazon.

During the gameplay you can dial in on your cellphone and tag any song that you’re listing to, and then preview, buy and download the song on Rockstar’s social networking website.

The game is expected to sell 9,000,000 copies on launch, meaning a lot of customers who would be looking to download MP3s for their players.

Amazon are seen by the music industry as a player capable of loosening Apple’s grip over the digital music download arena.

As iTunes and Apple close in on total dominance in the music industry, and the digital music market, it’s worth looking at just how Apple was allowed to get such a stranglehold on one of the biggest industries in the world economy.

With the music business being so lucrative, how can the major labels have allowed Apple to get so big, so quickly? In just five years Apple has grown to own 70% of all online music sales, and is expected to top 28% of ALL music sales come 2012.

Apple’s foray into the music industry after they acquired SoundJam MP in 2000, a program that was to become the iTunes application.

The music labels made an exclusive agreement to license their intellectual property to Apple because initially the iTunes Store was only available on the Mac, which represented a smaller marketplace that the studios could test the fledgling digital download market.

Naturally the sales to Mac users came about very quickly, resulting a Windows version of iTunes being launched soon after; opening up the World market for Apple, iTunes and the music industry as a whole.

This instant control iTunes was afforded has been impossible for anyone to break ever since.

In addition to the monopoly iTunes enjoyed, the global success of the iPod helped increase the reach of the digital download platform.

Five years old this week, Apple’s iTunes has grown to an unrivalled size and has sold over four billion tracks. iTunes has a share of around 70% of all of the digital music sold the world over.

Speculation puts Apple, and iTunes’ share of all sales of music at somewhere around the 28% mark over the next five years. This is partly due to its dominance in the digital music market, and the falling sales of CDs in bricks and mortar stores.

Digital music is expected to account for 40% of all music sales by 2012 according to figures released by InStat, which means that if Apple holds onto the digital music share it currently has, it will be responsible for more than a quarter of all music sales come 2012.

Paul Resnikoff, the editor of Digital Music News said:

I’m very skeptical about whether iTunes can be unseated, because there’s not a lot of consumer pain there.

iTunes came about when Apple bought the little program SoundJam MP, in 2000. If only they knew how big it would become and how the whole of the music industry would be changed forever.

High street giant HMV is hoping to take advantage of the online community by launching its own social networking website. HMV hopes that its new site will allow members to sign up and share their music tastes with other members by importing their own MP3 files directly to the website.

The social networking website is called ‘Get Closer’ and is now being tested by just 1,000 beta testers. HMV hopes to launch the website on September 1st.

When users upload their own music they become linked to other members with similar tastes in something HMV is calling a ‘Spider Cloud’, based on the music genre, the artists and indeed the films they share an interest in.

The chief executive of HMV, Simon Fox, said:

We will then match you up with similar people. It’s all about connections and collections.

HMV is looking to online music as CD sales have been dropping in sales in stores, resulting in the high street retailer reducing the floor space it devotes to CD.

HMV hope to fund the website through advertising revenues.

In the coming months the amount of music made available on MP3 via download with DRM removed is expected to increase. DRM means Digital Rights Management, which is a form of copyright protection, reducing the way users can copy music from the MP3 players to their PCs and other formats.

Since the advent of the MP3 player and digital music, online digital downloads has become a thriving business. Instat, a market researcher, has just released a report showing that sales of digital downloads has now topped $3.05 Billion, which shows an increase of 49 percent from 2006.

Online digital downloads now account for a staggering 10% of all music sales, which is an increase from just 6% in 2007. Projections from Instat say that digital music sales will account for 40% of the market’s music sales in 2012.

It’s Apple who are expected to be the big winner in all of this as they’re grabbing the majority of the sales. Apple’s iTunes has only been running for 5 years and has already sold over 4 billion tunes, which represents a mammoth 70% of all online music sales worldwide. Even with the market becoming more competitive thanks to Walmart, Amazon and Tesco joining the fray, Apple is still expected to hold onto more than 25% of all digital music sales before iTunes reaches the 10 year mark.

It’s not like iTunes is struggling for coverage either. An estimated 30% of all computers in the world have the application installed.

As music downloads increase, you can expect Apple to be at the forefront of the technology, carving themselves an ever increasing piece of the pie.

One of the biggest advantages an MP3 player has over any other previous music format is that free music has always been fairly easy to come by. While you can get free CDs in certain Sunday newspapers, they always tend to be older, more over-played material. With MP3s however there are plenty of websites offering free, legitimate and legal, music downloads of the latest tracks.

AC/DC front man Brian Johnson is currently offering three tracks as free music downloads, all of them original tracks, to celebrate the release of the new film, Totally Baked, on DVD.

The film is a ‘stoner’ comedy produced by the AC/DC front man. Brian Johnson also produced the tracks for the film’s soundtrack. The tracks include ‘Chain Gang’, ‘Chase that Tail’ and ‘Who Phoned the Law’.

You can download all three tracks for a limited period only, and rip them to your MP3 player by following this link.

10% of all of the DVD sales from the website are donated to the organisation ‘NOTML’, which is the National Organisation to Reform Marijuana Laws in the USA.