Congrats on the application, which looks very interesting. I’m crossing my figures for your app review!

The app I made is called Bookmark and it does most of what Kamran was looking for plus it adds better controls for moving forward and backward within a book using a control I call the Time Ribbon. Alderete speculated that creating an alternative audiobook player would cost in the high-five figures to develop. I think that would have been accurate under OS 2.0 (when this article was written) before Apple provided access to the iPod. As it is, the app has cost me $200 and about 120 hours of my time. I submitted it to Apple last week and do not expect an approval or rejection until the end of next week at the earliest.

I’ve posted screenshots and a video at bookmarkapp.com. If any of you are hardcore iPhone users and would like a preview copy, I could provide one. Just use the contact info on the site.

Others are having the issue, too. See this link (although there seems to be some confusion over a separate DRM issue):

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7598255

Where are you encountering others who are having the problem? Do you have more specifics about any of the tracks that won’t play back? When you write “will not play at all,” what exactly happens when you select one of these tracks and press the play button?

And, uh, I assume you mean that the tracks played fine on the 1.1.4 release of the iPhone firmware? (There was no “1.4” version of the iPhone.)

That said, it seems extremely unlikely that any third-party is going to try to compete with Apple’s already very good iPod software that runs on the iPhone. While there are many, many flaws with it, particularly for us audiobook aficionados, it’s still outstanding, and represents a huge amount of work. Even taking out the features for music playback, and concentrating exclusively on audiobook playback features, I would guess that a quality solution would still require a very serious (high five or low six figures) development effort. With the prospect of competing with Apple, the developer would have to be someone who did not expect or need to make back their investment in direct App Store sales.

That’s not as crazy as it sounds. For example, I could see Amazon.com doing something like this, through their Audible.com subsidiary. They would never make the investment back in application sales, but they could easily make it back in promotion, awareness, and thus increased audiobook sales. The more I sit here and think about it, the more I think it’s a great idea for Amazon.

This is kind of like how Apple (publicly) talks about iTunes music sales; they (say they) make their real money on iPods, not on music. The difference would be Apple makes money on the razors (iPods), while Amazon/Audible makes money on the blades (audiobooks).

Anyway, for now, we’re going to have to make due with the built-in iPod application which, while not perfect, does play back audiobooks quite well.

I just got my iPhone 3g and was wondering whether you’ve discovered a third party audiobook application that might have a better bookmarking feature compared to what we have as default. The Cowon and Creative can do multiple bookmarks per audiobook (such as per chapter) and the ability to bookmark your place on the fly and pause after a couple of seconds. This way, when you start the book after a gap (say 1 or 2 days), you have a couple of seconds to re-orient yourself with the current situation before moving on.

I hope a third party app can address this issue.