I’m still waiting for a deluxe boxed set of all the audiobooks, like the deluxe print books set, but if you’re just looking for a great deal on a complete set, packaging be damned, here’s all seven Harry Potter audiobooks at Amazon.com, at a 40% discount from full retail.

It’s still $275, but considering what they cost individually, if you want to own all seven, this is the way to go. The total running time is almost five days — at under $2.50/hour, it’s hard to imagine a better value for your entertainment dollar. Enjoy!

Want crime reports for your neighborhood? Got ‘em. Want restaurant inspection reports? Got ‘em. Want reviews of local establishments on Yelp? Got ‘em. They compile standard news outlets, public records, other local sites, and even geo-tagged Flickr photos.

Go to the site, type in your street address, and then spend the next hour (or more) browsing the different pieces of information available. This is seriously interesting. I think in the long run it’ll be as influential as craigslist.

(I have no affiliation with EveryBlock, I just figure that everyone has an interest in what’s happening in their neighborhood, and this looks like a compelling way to find out.)

Now, it’s a rare person who would want and use every single one of these applications; there’s just too much variety to have everything fit perfectly. But if even half of them would be useful, then you’re way, way ahead.

For me, the big winners are 1password, TaskPaper, CSSEdit, Snapz Pro, and Pixelmator. Pixelmator alone costs $10 more than the bundle, and I’d been meaning to buy it for over a month, since this terrific review of Pixelmator appeared in Macworld magazine. So buying the bundle was an easy decision.

Maybe it will be for you as well.

HEARING HARRY
You may have the seen the avalanche of press coverage about the new “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” hardcover selling 8.3 million U.S. copies in its first 24 hours of release. […] More than 225,000 audiobook cassette or compact disc copies were [also] sold the first weekend. Those were the best two-day results in audiobook history, according to Random House. […] What’s not available is an iTunes download for your iPod. The first six Potter books are available through iTunes at prices ranging from $33 to $50. But a Random House spokeswoman said no iTunes date has been announced for “Deathly Hallows” and that she has no other information about download plans.

So if you’re still waiting, I suggest running out to Costco and getting the CD version, which had the lowest price I’ve seen by $10, and then buying a copy of Audiobook Builder to make importing it into iTunes more pleasurable. The two together will still cost less than Deathly Hallows would have cost through the iTunes Store, and you’ll be able to use Audiobook Builder on other books in the future.

Beyond that general impression, I have a few specific things I thought would be worth writing about.

Buying and Activation Was Painless

I wasn’t willing to camp out or wait in line more than an hour prior to the store opening. But in spite of having 200-250 people ahead of me (a line long enough that it had to be split into two, with us “overflow” people being in a second line outside the mall), once the store re-opened at 6pm it only took about an hour to get to the front of the line, and about 4 minutes to actually purchase my phone. My overall time commitment was about 2 hours. Apple, and presumably the mall folks as well, did a terrific job of managing the external queue, and the customers inside the store.

Once out of the store, I actually had Real Life Activities planned, so I didn’t even open the box to look at the unit until almost midnight. My activation process, unlike a few I’ve read, was quick and smooth, no hiccups. And although I was transferring my number from another wireless provider (goodbye Verizon!), it transferred with no further intervention from me; within an hour I could make calls, and about a day later I could receive them. All in all, a very satisfying and convenient process — which is kind of amazing given that there are three major businesses involved, including one (Verizon) who has every incentive to make the process hard.

What Other People Are Saying

There are a number of other online reviews and personal experiences; here are a few that are both thoughtful and I (mostly) agreed with:

• Daring Fireball’s iPhone First Impressions
• The Official stevenf iPhone Review
• James Duncan Davidson’s iPhone Lists
• Glenn Fleishman’s First Days with the iPhone

(The NYTimes and WSJ reviews are also good, but their for-pay nature makes them harder to link to…)

Audiobooks on iPhone Notes

A few things I haven’t read elsewhere. First of all, the main reason I got the phone was to keep Aldo on Audiobooks current on listening to audiobooks on an iPod. I’m happy to report that the iPhone is a superb audiobook playback device. It is in most ways a major leap forward, making my 2nd generation iPod nano look primitive. There are also a few serious flaws, which I hope will be corrected. I’ll have more details on both sides of the coin in a post tomorrow Sunday soon.

Second, getting the 8 gigabyte version of the iPhone is a no-brainer. Previously I recommended the 4 gigabyte iPod nano as the best iPod for audiobooks. 4 gigs of memory is plenty of room for audiobooks, podcasts, and a modest collection of music. This is because the iPod nano’s screen is small enough that it’s not very interesting for photos, and nanos cannot play video at all, so you don’t need much, if any, room for these media.

The iPhone’s screen and features, however, are such that you’ll almost certainly want to have a collection of photos, and videos have never looked so good on such a small device. As a result, the percentage of space I allocate to audiobooks has gone from 75% to 50% of the total capacity, making the extra space much more necessary. For only 20% more cost, you get double the capacity. Yeah, it’s an extra $100, but if you’re already spending $500 on a phone, you can spend $600 just as easily. Get the 8 gig model.

Third, you can listen to an audiobook over the speakerphone. The audio fidelity and volume are not good enough for music (IMHO), but are decent for listening to spoken word, at least in a reasonably quiet environment. This is really cool, especially because…

Fourth, while the built-in microphone and click-control of the included iPhone headphones are very, very cool, I had forgotten how much I hate the standard iPod earbuds. Uncomfortable, and they won’t stay in my ears. Just awful. But I don’t want to give up the microphone or one button control; it’s far too useful when listening to audiobooks, where you need to pause playback to talk to someone. Audiobooks are different from music; you can’t just pull out an earbud and miss a few minutes of the track while you talk. But hitting pause on the iPhone itself is a multi-step process, once the screen sleeps and locks. The click-control makes that a non-issue…except it means you have to use the included headphones.

This is a huge opportunity for Shure, Etymotic, and the other makers of high-end headsets (my wife likes her Shure E3c set, and I was about to buy the new Shure SE210, which fit great at Macworld Expo, but they don’t have a mic or controls). I am totally ready to buy a whole new set of nice headphones to work with my iPhone, but only if it has the built-in mic and controls.

Other iPhone Notes

Fifth, while others have complained about AT&T’s “2.5 gen” EDGE network, my experience has been better. Maybe my expectations were lowered by the universally negative comments, but personally I found it amazing that I could be on vacation in a semi-rural town (~2500 official population) this past week, and have a usable version of the Internet in my pocket. Yes, it could be faster; I wouldn’t want to do my daily surfing on it. But to pull out the phone to get a definition of “second cousin, twice removed” while drinking margaritas on the deck, or to read MacInTouch while lying in a hammock, it was a perfectly adequate implementation of a capability that is, or ought to be, mind-blowing.

Finally, 373 contacts on my phone is too many; finding a phone number on the phone is slower and harder than it should be. Not horrible, not hard, just not graceful. (Favorites are only useful if you keep the list very short; I’m trying to keep mine to one screen, no scrolling.) My first attempt to improve this was a Smart Group in Address Book that only included contacts that were useful on an iPhone, that is, those with a phone number, email address, or URL:

This reduced the total number of contacts to 363 — not exactly a huge improvement.

More fine-grained groups on the iPhone do help, but Address Book needs some small-but-significant improvements to make my groups more useful with my iPhone. Specifically, I want to be able to exclude a set of contacts that are not useful on my phone, because they are old or or people I am not ever likely to call (but need to keep for e.g. twice-yearly mass mailings).

To do this, I need a way to create Smart Groups that exclude contacts which are in another group. That is, I have an “Old / Hide” group of contacts, that I manually maintain, of those contacts which I want to hold onto, but which I don’t want to carry around with me. But for that to be useful, I need to be able to create Smart Groups that subtract this group out of it. You can do this with Smart Playlists in iTunes, but there is currently no way to do it with Smart Groups in Address Book.

Michael Connelly and Harry Bosch are who introduced me to the amazing pleasure that is listening to audiobooks. Rochelle and I began listening to Lost Light, the ninth Harry Bosch novel, on a drive back from LA. When we got home we parked the car, threw our stuff in the house, and climbed into bed to continue listening. It remains my favorite audiobook so far.

One of the truly terrific things about the Harry Bosch books is that the entire series is available in unabridged form. The Overlook is the thirteenth book so far, and all told there is more than 125 hours of listening pleasure. If you want to start at the beginning, here’s the full series to date:

1. The Black Echo [Formats: MP3 CD, Audio CD]
2. The Black Ice [Formats: MP3 CD, Audio CD]
3. The Concrete Blonde [Formats: MP3 CD, Audio CD]
4. The Last Coyote [Formats: MP3 CD, Audio CD]
5. Trunk Music [Formats: MP3 CD]
6. Angels Flight [Formats: MP3 CD, Audio CD]
7. A Darkness More Than Night
8. City of Bones
9. Lost Light
10. The Narrows
11. The Closers
12. Echo Park
13. The Overlook

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You can read the synopsis at Amazon.com; my summary: it’s a terrific novel, and a great spoken performance. I especially enjoy the character of Agent Pendergast, who seems to be the authors’ favorite character. He is a delight. Rochelle and I listened to The Cabinet of Curiosities, which also features Pendergast, before we realized that the book had others that came prior, and was abridged. In spite of that, we were gripped the entire time we were listening, and didn’t mind the traffic we were in much at all.

To date there are seven published novels featuring Agent Pendergast, with an eighth on the way later this year:

1. Relic
2. Reliquery (print only)
3. The Cabinet of Curiosities (abridged)
4. Still Life with Crows (abridged)
5. Brimstone (abridged)
6. Dance of Death
7. The Book of the Dead
8. The Wheel of Darkness

Preston and Child are a great writing team. The later novels by the duo have been best sellers, and have also done extremely well in audiobook format. I believe that’s why Relic is being re-released at this time. If Relic’s publication is an indication that the other books will be issued in digital and unabridged formats also, then I’m very, very excited.

The Sonos system has been thoroughly written up in a number of articles and reviews, including Dan Frakes in Playlist (probably the most complete explanation of the system), David Pogue in the NYT and Walt Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal. But I think the best overview of the system and its advantages over competitors comes from Louis Rossetto writing at Cool Tools. Louis is one of the original founders of Wired Magazine, and his review provides more context than others I’ve read, which is essential in understanding why the $500 Sonos ZonePlayer is so much better than the $100 AirPort Express with AirTunes.

With so many good reviews, I’ll just add a few of my own notes:

• The system provides a wonderful out-of-box experience. Like an Apple product, unpacking is An Experience, with well thought out package design and gorgeous quick-start explanations.
• The Mac OS X software is terrific, it’s a standard application, no installer necessary. (I really appreciate that, and it stands in stark contrast to the Mac software for TiVo, which I decided I didn’t trust enough to install).
• On first run it checks to make sure you have the latest release of the software, and will download the newer version if you don’t. This is also true of the firmware in the Sonos hardware, which will automatically upgrade itself (you just need to confirm it’s OK).
• Running the assistant to set things up, it automatically detected my firewall settings, and gave exact instructions for what to do next, with instructions clear and simple enough they would pass the proverbial grandmother test. This was also true when I installed the Windows version of the software on Rochelle’s (now decomissioned) PC.
• The other steps in the process were similarly easy to just follow along as the software lead me.
• Most importantly, it was able to use my iTunes music library, natively and automatically.

That’s not to say that the Sonos Desktop software isn’t without flaws. It’s not iTunes, either in flexibility or in usability. But if you set up your playlists in iTunes, the Sonos can make use of those, so it gets the job done. You’ll want those playlists for your iPod anyway, right? And of course, it won’t play music purchased from the iTunes Store.

At any rate, for having music playing regularly, throughout the whole house, the Sonos cannot be beat. Highly recommended.

Audiobook Builder gets my rave review for three reasons:

1. It’s easy to use
2. It saves a lot of time
3. The final product is superior

The only real “problem” with it is that it is for Mac OS X only.

Update: Audibook Builder was recently reviewed as a Mac Gem by Macworld, and received a 4½ mouse rating.

Easy to Use

If you’ve followed, or even read, my instructions for how to import Audio CD audiobooks into iTunes, you know that the process of importing a series of CDs which are all connected, and which need to be played back in strict order, is a cumbersome task that involves a lot of steps: disc swapping, settings changes, and fiddling with file extensions and iTunes meta data. It’s painful, and only the desire to have a good book on your iPod keeps you going.

Except for some set-and-forget options to configure the first time you use Audiobook Builder, the process of importing a new audiobook is a sequence of three steps, two of which are dead simple, and the “hard” one is straightforward.

Audiobook Builder deals with all the complexities of audibooks for iTunes and the iPod behind the scenes. This means that it is easy to import audiobooks correctly, every time, and without painstaking attention to detail.

Saves Time

My manual process requires a few steps before and after importing a disc, which are repeated for each disc or track imported. This can take quite a while, because there is a wait of up to 10 minutes per disc while it’s being imported. The attention to detail required to get correct results (due to the finicky behavior of iTunes and the iPod with regards to audiobooks) means that it can be hard to multi-task while you’re doing it. So importing an audiobook from CDs, especially if it’s a long book, can take a fair amount of time. For me, a 10+ disc book is going to take 30-45 minutes of time, minimum. This adds up if you are importing books regularly, to feed a 2 hour daily commute.

With Audiobook Builder, there’s still the amount of time it takes to import and encode the audio tracks from the CDs; that remains constant. But most of the other tedious steps are eliminated, and so the amount of attention required drops by 90%. By comparison to the example above, the same audiobook takes me about 5-10 minutes of actual effort, most of which is looking for cover art on Amazon.com. That’s a huge difference for me.

Superior Results

But the real value of Audiobook Builder may be in the results. In contrast to my manual method, the books that come out of Audiobook Builder:

• Are one or two continuous tracks, not a series of tracks, one for each disc in the audiobook.
• Have chapter marks placed wherever you want them; by default, at the disc boundaries, i.e., about every hour or so.
• Always appear in the Audiobook menu in iTunes and on the iPod.

The number one question readers ask me is How do I get an imported book to appear in the Audiobooks menu?, and problems with playback or list order are also frequent. Using Audiobook Builder pretty much eliminates all of those issues. And by reducing the number of tracks required for a single audiobook (down to just one for a 12-hour or shorter book), it makes organizing in iTunes far simpler, and finding and playing back on an iPod far easier.

Limitations

Although Audiobook Builder is terrific, it’s not (yet) perfect. In particular:

• The window for organizing tracks into chapter groupings can be hard to use, until you understand it. I figured it out by making a bunch of mistakes. Unfortunately…
• There is no Undo for mistakes you make when organizing tracks into chapters. Correcting a mistake can take a fair amount of work, up to and including starting over.
• I would like an auto-feed-and-eject mode for adding discs, like iTunes provides for importing stacks of music CDs.
• I would like more control over where to split long audiobooks; splitting at a fixed number of hours can leave you with one long part, and one very short part, when the book is not much longer than the part limit setting. (I expect this would be for advanced users only.)

With regard to the first two limitations, they sound like a big deal but they are not. Audiobook Builder’s default behavior and grouping is usually fine. It’s only when you want to obsessively get every chapter just so (hello Harry Potter fans!) that this can be a problem. I have only fiddled with 2-3 books so far, out of 10-12 that I’ve imported with Audiobook Builder, and only because I’m anal retentive particular about some things.

Recommendation

Obviously, I think that Audiobook Builder is an outstanding tool. Reading the support forum and exchanging email with Splasm Software, I understand that it will get even better, reducing or eliminating my caveats above. But even today, at version 1.0.6, Audiobook Builder is a terrific piece of software that is well worth your $10.

Let me be even more clear. You should definitely buy Audiobook Builder if:

• You import audiobooks from CDs regularly (no matter where you get the audiobooks, library, Kitabe.com, etc.). I would define “regularly” as twice a month or more.
• You value your time, and spending time in front of your Mac fussing with CDs and iTunes is not your idea of fun. (This is especially true if you bill by the hour, and spend time importing CDs instead of working. cough)
• You’re anal retentive particular about the organization of your iTunes collection, especially your audiobooks.

If any of these are true about you, you should get Audiobook Builder. If all of them are true (welcome brother!), then today the clouds will part and the sun shine brightly down upon you. I.e., what are you waiting for? Go buy it now!

Summary

Audiobook Builder by Splasm Software.

Requirements

• Mac OS X 10.4 or later
• QuickTime 7 or later

Audiobook Builder is a universal binary and works on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs. There is no Windows version, nor does Splasm Software have one planned.

Pricing

• $9.95 for a single user license
• $14.95 for a family pack

Disclaimer

I paid for my Audiobook Builder license, and I don’t get any referral fees or other kickbacks from Splasm Software. I just like the product, a lot.

(I do get affiliate payments for Audible.com and Amazon.com; but Audible.com could be seen as an alternative/competitor to Audiobook Builder.)

The first two books are (in order) Dead I Well May Be and The Dead Yard, and they’re available from Audible.com via the links, as well as Amazon.com and other online stores. Both are highly recommended, and judging from the early reviewer comments, so is this latest.

Note: I’ve only been able to get The Bloomsday Dead via Audible.com, though it’s listed on Amazon.com, as well a few of the specialized audiobook retailers. When I tried ordering it from Amazon.com, they sent me a follow-up email saying there was a delay of up to a month before they could ship it, so I cancelled the order. Audible.com released it the next day, and that was that.

The end is nigh. Preorder at Amazon.com today!

The first is that it’s an absolute grand slam home run. Think about it this way: take away the phone and the Internet connectivity, and it would still be a breakthrough product, a truly amazing next generation for the iPod. It blows even the current iPods away, to say nothing of Zune and other competitors. People would easily pay $499 for it. (The original Newton MessagePad cost more at introduction, IIRC, $799.)

Similarly, take away the iPod and the Internet connectivity, and the phone is amazing. And then look at just the Internet connectivity — the email, web browsing, Google Maps, the connected widgets like weather and stocks — and in a handheld form factor, it’s revolutionary too. Any of these alone, it’s worth $499. Put them all together…

Second thought, can you guess at what time Steve announced the iPhone?

Backtracking using the CNET play-by-play of the keynote, it looks like the initial (and foolish) sell off came when Steve said he wasn’t going to talk about new Mac products. I can’t figure that out at all. When Steve said he wasn’t going to talk about the Mac for the rest of the keynote, I got chills down my spine, I was so excited. What in god’s name inspired people to sell at that point?

OK, while we’re doing stock graphs, one last thought, courtesy of John Gruber:

And it will be interesting to compare Cingular vs. Verizon over the rest of this year…

I am so looking forward to this book. A month before it gets released I am going to re-listen to all six of the prior books, to have the whole series fresh in my head. It’s very exciting to know that it must be getting closer!

• The packaging is not just smaller, it’s hard, clear plastic instead of cardboard. It’s a really clever design that holds the nano suspended in the front of the box. There’s a small label on the back of the bracket that holds the nano tightly, which illustrates how to flex the bracket to release the nano. Very clever design…but it took me a few tugs and pulls and a bit of frustration, before I turned the piece over, and saw the illustration.

• The new nano looks and feels substantially smaller than the old nano, until you line them up right next to each other. The new nano is a teensy bit thinner, but virtually identical in the other two dimensions. The size difference is mostly optical illusion caused by the new rounded edges.

• Speaking of rounded edges, the new nano comes with a new dock connector fit bracket. The new nano fits into the nano bracket of my Logitech mm50 portable speakers, but my old nano will not fit into the new Apple bracket. It’s a bit too thick, and doesn’t have the rounded edges. I suspect that the new nano will work with most products which fit the old nano form factor, but the reverse will be hit and miss. Products that support a perfect fit for the new nano will not work with the old one.

• The new nano requires iTunes 7 to sync with a computer. Normally I like to wait a week or two before trying new versions of iTunes, but in this case, I had to install it. (Working wonderfully so far, knock wood.) A very nice set of improvements, including a few things of use to audiobook aficionados like me; more on those in another post.

• The center select button, the “dot” in the middle of the click wheel, is very slightly concave (the button on the old nano is perfectly flat). It seems like such a tiny difference, and I’m sure by measurements it’s a small fraction of a millimeter, but it’s both quite visible as a real-world gradient, and a really wonderful tactile difference. You instantly know when your thumb is on or touching the button. Just another one of those aesthetic touches that only Apple seems to think of and consider worthwhile. They seem small, but they add up.

All in all, I think the new 8 gig nano is a terrific refinement to a device which I already thought was nearly perfect. And now that it’s sync’ed up with my audiobooks, I am looking forward to road testing it later today during my commute.

In addition to stories and so on, he’s also got recipes and histories of favorite cocktails. While I’d certainly make a different choice for tequila than he does, the recipes all sound interesting, especially the Richmond Gimlet and the Brisa, both his own creations. Recommended reading.