What is the best little machine to buy?

You can get an older iRiver mp3 player for next to nothing. I get 24 hours+ on a single battery from mine, and even a half-gig of RAM will hold more songs than you’ll ever need at one time. I’ve seen them selling for $20 or less.

The iPod shuffle would be the tiniest, but navigation from book to book is a little trickier than it would be on an iPod Nano. Both connect to Audible.com through the iTunes store.

As an added bonus, the Nano gives you a video camera, in case you spot something noteworthy on your walk.

I second the Nano. It’s easy to use. I don’t recommend the shuffle for books as it’ll shuffle through the book chapters.

For the absolute easiest to use, yeah, the Nano.

But personally I would go for the Sansa Sansa Clip+.

Less than half the price, pretty much the same features as the Nano.

Agree that the nano is the priciest of the bunch. The OP was saying s/he is mp3 illiterate, and that’s why I thought the nano would be the best. I haven’t seen the iriver that @SmashTheState mentioned, but the user interface on that may be good as well.

the user interface on [the iRiver] may be good as well.

Sadly it’s not.

I have one just like @SmashTheState describes. It’s great for me, but easy-to-use is not one of its virtues.

I don’t see a SansaSansa clip on the audible manager but there is an iiriver with a cd player on ebay for cheap!!

@faye wrote: “illiterate”

When you rip your music be sure to not use a variable bit rate (VBR) compression method. VBR mp3 files take more juice to decode.

Don’t forget to get good earphones. I found the Sure SE530 buds profoundly satisfying. Pricy, but worth every nickel.

I would think you would also want to think about how much memory the player has. Audio books take up a fair amount of memory.

I see on audio manager there are 25 devices

I don’t see a SansaSansa clip on the audible manager

Is there a link where we can see that list?

@jaytkay there is sandisk, which I see is a very good price! Thanks everyone. Yes, I don’t want music, just my books so it has to hold lots of hours.

@jaytkay, if you go to audible books and request adding a device you,ll see their list. I find I’m wondering why there are so many ipods for sale on ebay- people bumping up or not liking them?