My MP3 Player Dilemna

Well my site has been up for all of 4 or 5 days and I have not made a post so it is about time. So you may or may not know that I am completely addicted to listening to books on my MP3 player. I love Librivox. If you have never checked it out it may be one of the coolest things on the Internet. Basically it is a community site devoted to the recording text from the public domain into MP3 format. Currently there are about 1500 books recorded in English and several hundred others in other languages. It is amazing. For obvious reasons (copyright being the big ) there are no modern books but there are a ton of classics, basically anything written pre-1930 is fair game. So, over the last year and half since I discovered librivox.org I have listened to somewhere on the order of 100 books. It is definitely worth checking out. Back to the topic at hand. So I listen to these books on my Sandisk Sansa C250. Until last week. Now for the third time my player has failed. I lost output to my left headphone. This is the same way the first one failed 3 months after I bought it. The warranty replacement failed almost out of box for a bad battery connection. The third failed after 6 more months. Now I need a new MP3 player and I am no longer under warranty. So, I don't think I can, in good conscience, buy another Sandisk player. As an electrical engineer I disassembled the player I had and found the problem (poor PCB layout). Then I looked at disassembly pictures of a Sansa Clip and saw the exact same connector. I did note that the Sansa Fuze has a much better connector and mounting scheme but I don't think I can bring myself to buy another Sansa after this experience. So I am switching over to who... IPOD is very MAC everything is proprietary and it is not very compatible with open DRM (like for library audio books or Audible.com). The Creative products are fine except that they don't treat the device like a drive so moving media is tricky. iRiver products have a good PC interface but the low end products get bad reviews. The Cowon products appear to be great but they start out of my price range (<80). So what do I do. updated: This morning I made a trip to Circuit City and got to hold on to a couple of different players. I decided I liked the new Creative ZEN. Unfortunately CC only sells the 8GB version and it is $150. When I got home I found the 2GB version for $69 on Amazon. What a deal. I ordered one. Now I am just trying to decide if I should have gone with the 4GB version. I guess I can always add space with the SD slot.