It’s 1 a.m. and you’re screwed. The computer screen is a desolate blank slate and all you’ve managed to type is, “Crime and Punishment was about-” ?” what was it all about? Why couldn’t Dostoevsky make it short and simple? Why does the book have to be so damn long?

Like many students, you’ve procrastinated on this English paper, not even cracking open the assigned book until now. Or, maybe you are the kind of student who has read the book and still remains clueless to its convoluted prose.

Whatever kind of good, bad or in-between student you are, the stress is killing you and you need help quickly. The book store has long been closed, so the Cliffs Notes version is a pipe dream. Before driving over to Blockbuster to search for a movie version, consider this new quick alternative to a finished paper: NotePods, audio summaries of various novels and plays.

Created by InterLingua Eduacational Publishing, these audio summaries are designed specifically for students who need help with term papers and exams. They can be downloaded from www.notepods.com at $1.99 each and can be played on iPods and MP3 players.

Students can listen to summaries of their assigned readings on the bus, at the gym, eating lunch and even while writing the term paper. It is easily accessible and proves to be very convenient.

In addition to the audio summaries, you can also download text summaries in PDF or ipod note formats for $1.99, and for some books, the entire text (without the added weight and waterlogged pages) for the same price.

So far, InterLingua has an offering of NotePods on 55 books and plays, with a goal of 250 titles by the end of 2007. If you’re lucky, maybe the book you’ve been assigned is on the list. Some currently available titles include “Brave New World,” “Much Ado about Nothing,” “1984,” “Pride and Prejudice” and “All Quiet on the Western Front.” A complete list is available on its website.

InterLingua determined its growing list of titles based on an online survey. The survey determined common required reading for high schools and colleges and were ranked by popularity. InterLingua’s priority was to create NotePods for the most popularly used books and plays first.

The audio summaries are comprehensive and concise, with a narrator who describes only the most basic actions of each chapter. Each summary is organized into chapters and parts so students can follow along.

The audio summary I sampled was for Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” and clocked in at about one hour and fourteen minutes. This is definitely shorter than how long it would have taken me to read the book, or re-read it for comprehension and analysis.

Unfortunately, there are limitations to all of this simplicity. NotePods are not like books on tape, where the author’s every word is expressed. Characters half-heartedly come to life; their exact quotations give way to paraphrase. The compressed, less artistic quality of the work that is provided would be a depressing replacement to the vivid imagery and humor in the dialogue is lost in the summaries.

In stating this, students should be discouraged from substituting NotePods for the original text. Like Cliffs Notes, NotePods are intended as study aids, meant only to help students understand the text more thoroughly. In fact, this is even stated in a disclaimer before each NotePods audio summary.

So, think of NotePods as either a supplement to the assigned reading-or as a slacker’s last resort. Either way you look at it, for $1.99, it’s a cheap fix.

Karen Balmes can be reached at [email protected]