Audiobooks

Free audiobooks at Barnes & Noble

April 27, 2009

Barnes & Noble is giving away nine free audiobooks. Most of the selections are short stories, but Tom Sawyer is the full length novel. All are offered in MP3 format, which should be playable on any device. (With iTunes 8 you can change the media type to Audiobook to make tracks in any format behave […]

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Backing Up in an Audiobook

April 3, 2009

After posting my explanation of Nearly Perfect Audiobooks, I got feedback from a number of readers who preferred to have their audiobooks in lots of short, 1-3 minute tracks. I find many tracks to be incredibly annoying when organizing and managing my books, especially when manually creating a “Listen Now” playlist to compliment the smart […]

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Speeding up and slowing down audiobooks

February 10, 2009

Once your iPod or iPhone recognizes a track as an audiobook (see FAQ #1 for details), you have the ability to speed up or slow down the playback of the track. For people looking to power through a book (say, while driving to your book club), speeding up playback can be useful. For language learning, […]

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Read me a story, Brad Pitt

February 5, 2009

It’s an older article, but Slate Magazine has a terrific piece about the importance of narration in the quality of audiobooks, from hard boiled fiction to urban sociology. Read Me a Story, Brad Pitt is subtitled “When audiobook casting goes terribly wrong,” and gives examples of the three most common — and easily avoided — […]

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Making Nearly Perfect Audiobooks

January 30, 2009

This is an overview of my current process for importing audiobooks. It’s a preview of my forthcoming (no, really, I promise) update to my instructions for importing audiobooks from CDs into iTunes. For OCD types, anal-retentives, and Harry Potter fans (hello brothers and sisters!), this preview may be sufficient for you to follow along on […]

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Another way to import audiobooks from cassettes

January 29, 2009

The New York Times has an article about the Alesis TapeLink, which is a tape deck you can attach to your computer via USB, and use to convert analog cassette tapes to a digital format you can use with iTunes, or any other media player. I haven’t tried it, and at $299 list price, I’m […]

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Useful news feeds at Audible.com

December 19, 2008

If you are looking to stay “on top” of all the latest audiobook releases, there are a variety of sources. Most of the different audiobook publishing houses and audiobook stores have email newsletters, or even paper catalogs they will send you in the mail. I’ve signed up for a lot of these, and find them […]

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iPod-friendly downloads from libraries

December 15, 2008

A couple of weeks ago, OverDrive, a technology vendor that provides many libraries with the software behind their download-to-loan content, released a new version of the OverDrive Media Console that is now Mac-compatible and iPod-friendly. It accomplishes this by providing loanable downloads in MP3 format, instead of a DRM-wrapped WMA (Windows Media) format. It’s not […]

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iTunes 8 is great for audiobook lovers

September 11, 2008

The number one question I receive from visitors to Aldo on Audiobooks is “How do I get my audiobooks to show up in the Audiobooks section of iTunes and my iPod/iPhone?” iTunes 8 makes answering this question almost trivial. Here are the details.

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Another audiobook importing tool for Windows

May 1, 2008

In a recent post I recommended a few tools for importing audiobooks, which work around some of the more tedious aspects of importing audiobooks using iTunes. Last week I came across another interesting tool for Windows users, which might also be useful: Teridon’s Audiobook Helper I have not yet tested it with importing a book, […]

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iPhone user interface quirk #1 for audiobooks

April 23, 2008

Dan Sanderson provides a clear explanation, including pretty good photos, of one of the user interface “quirks” that can get you when using the iPhone for audiobooks, namely, the iPhone’s indicator and toggle buttons for Repeat and Shuffle modes are somewhat hidden, not 100% clear, and can be toggled accidentally if you’re not careful. When […]

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Free audiobooks via podcasts

April 16, 2008

The San Francisco Chronicle recently ran a story about fledgling authors who get their start by publishing their books online, via podcast: Take my book. It’s free. Giving away books as podcasts is new way to promote sales. The basic idea is, the author reads their novel a chunk at a time, recording it, and […]

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