Talking books

steelydanfan

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Hi all, I am curious to know if anyone uses or has tried the "talking books" that I've heard you can get for ipods? Are they any good, is there a large back catalogue, are recent releases available, are they expensive, are they exclusive to ipod users, can you get them for Sony's range of hard disc players for example?
Cheers,
Oddbodd.
 
Talking books?, well I would call use the term talking books but i'm a huge fan of audiobooks and more recently podiobooks, I probably have over 200GB of audiobooks and maybe 1GB of downloaded podiobooks. They will work on any mp3 player but it's far better to use them on the ipod. Ipod audiobooks can be converted to AAC files which have a number of benefits over MP3 files, with these each audiobooks will bookmark the spot you last listened to, it will allow you to slow or speed up the speech rate, chapters can also be skipped/reversed with one button on audible.com files. Generally it's also easier to navigate an audio book with an ipod, for example it's a lot easier to scrub through 20 hours plus of audio with the ipods scrub wheel. None of the above works to perfection though, there are a number of inherent software bugs which means you need to learn a number of tricks and quirks to keep the all the audiobooks functions working smoothly. Bottom line though is if you defo want a Sony then these audiotitles will work on anything.

Right next up is the availability and cost. Audiobooks come in two forms those on cd (many cd's!) and those in the form of digital downloads.

CD Form - Audiobooks released on CD are hugely expensive, the prohibitive cost of these has been limiting the popularity of spoken word content for years now. For example From A Buick 8 by Stephen King is £28, Lord of the Rings The Complete Trilogy is £150. Also when you convert these titles on cd to mp3 you are often left with hundreds upon hundreds of mp3 files all of just a couple of minutes in length. It's surprising the number of people who then bung them on the player and get irratated changing the file every couple of minutes. so they give up on audiobooks right there and then. I use a program called mp3 merge (which is free) to merge them all together into either one file, or maybe 2 or 3. Real easy to use as well and it only takes a minute to do.

Digital Downloads - With the advent of broadband downloaded audiobooks are now far more popular. There are two main sources for them the itunes music store which is still very costly and obviously ipod only as the files will be AAC, although there are a few other players that will play them. Then there's audible.com, they use there own file format I think so you would need to check on audible.com which players they support. At first glance there prices are dearer than itms but that's only for one off downloads. If you take out a monthly suscription it becomes far cheaper, I priced the two books a month option a while back and it worked out as around £6 a book. Unfortunately for UK users the full catalogue is only open to the US customers, so us Brits are restricted in what we can buy from them.

This leaves the illegal methods of obtaining them which is how I get mine. One way is to head down to your local library and lend them, then you convert the cd into mp3 files and transfer them onto your player. This is how I got the Harry Potter titles, titles can also be ordered for like £1.50. Only problem with this is that most of the audiobooks are not released in the UK, making it hard to obtain legal titles for a decent price. I get all mine from a geezer I came across on ebay for roughly a quid a pop.

Now for Podiobooks, these are a relatively new form of spoken word content, these are free audiobook titles released weekly as podcast and picked up by podcasting software for use on mp3 players. I don't like (or understand particularly well) this podcasting software so I prefer to just download the .mp3 files by the trusty right click, save target as method. Generally books released this way offer up downloads of 20-30mb each week, telling maybe a chapter or two of the tale each week until the whole novel has been released. Visit podiobooks.com and check out what titles are available, I also set up a thread on a rival forum with a complete listing for these podiobooks so message me if you want the link.

Anything I didn't cover?
 
Wow, great answer Pete! Thank you for the info. and the correction "audiobooks" sounds a lot better ;)
I'm going to log onto a few of those web sites and have a look.
Cheers,
Oddbodd.
 

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