But the options provided by the iPod is not that great, just “Slower”, “Normal”, and “Faster”. Not a lot of control, and the speed change isn’t huge, in either direction. (And I find that it adds a nearly imperceptible but irritating clipping to speech). If you want to make an even bigger speed change, you need to turn to third-party tools that can process the tracks, and then sync the processed versions to your iPod or iPhone.

This is probably worth it only in extreme cases (how I would have loved it for The Grapes of Wrath in high school), but it’s up to you. On the Mac there are a couple options that I know of:

• AudioLobe
• The Amazing Slow-Downer (only slows down)

I don’t know the options for Windows as well, except for the cross-platform applications:

• The Amazing Slow-Downer

Please note these are not endorsements or recommendations, just pointers. If you have any suggestions, for either list, please send them to me!

Teridon’s Audiobook Helper

I have not yet tested it with importing a book, but it looks like it gets a couple of things really right, namely allowing you to set the meta data for the tracks manually, overriding what comes in from the Gracenote CDDB lookup that iTunes does automatically, and which is often inaccurate. Bogus meta data is one of the top causes for problems that people have with sort and playback order of audiobook tracks, and if this tool can reduce or eliminate that, it’s going to be very useful indeed.