With the launch of the store at Pottermore.com, it’s now possible to get digital versions of all seven Harry Potter novels.

I own all of the audiobooks twice over, and several of the printed books, but the eBooks represent something new: the chance to read the British version of the novels. Alas, due to insanely complicated—and insanely stupid—international publication rights and restrictions, and my credit card’s USA billing address, the Pottermore.com store did not want to allow me to buy the UK version of the books.

Here’s how I bought them anyway. (You can do the same for the audiobooks, too.)

The basic trick is that I bought a gift for a “friend” who lives in the UK. Buying a gift allows (or in theory requires) you to purchase the edition appropriate for the gift recipient, rather than restricting you to the edition you are allowed to buy. And since your “friend” is redeeming a gift credit, they don’t need to enter a billing address that gets verified (or not) by a credit card transaction.

The only “tricky” part is that you need to have two email addresses, one for you (the buyer) and one for your “friend” (the gift recipient). Many people have a home and a work email, but as long as you have one, it’s not hard to get a second on one of the different webmail services (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.).

The full walk-through of the process is pretty damn tedious, you have to create Pottermore.com accounts for both you and your “friend”, but in the end I turned my $62 American dollars into all seven British edition eBooks, and they work great on my iPad (and well enough on my iPhone). I’m very much looking forward to re-reading the books again, with the Philosopher’s Stone and “colours” and “chips” (fries) and “biscuits” (cookies) and “snogging” (PDA) and all the rest of the wonderful English language in which the books were originally written.

If you’ve wanted to listen to the magnificent Stephen Fry narrated versions of the books, but balked at the £240 price plus international shipping charges from Amazon.com UK, this is your opportunity to save quite a bit of money. To say nothing of instant gratification!

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My recommended solution for creating digital audiobooks from CDs, Audiobook Builder, has recently been updated, and comes with a new feature for renaming the chapters in an audiobook:

I don’t know that I’d want to use this on every book, but for those without interesting or meaningful chapter names (or if you’re just not as anal retentive as I am), this can be a nice time savings to make your chapter titles look neat and regular. This is especially useful if you’re creating a separate track for every chapter, and want to keep chapters in the right order. (I recommend a different approach, but it’s up to you.)

Other new features include additional metadata support, something that’s very welcome. All in all, a great update — and free to registered users!

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Two years in the making, or just two years late. At long last I’ve updated the article describing recommended devices for listening to audiobooks:

Which iPod Should I Buy for Listening to Audiobooks

Hopefully this will be useful to you during your holiday shopping! (And come back for my Recommended Audiobooks when you find a new toy under the tree for yourself, that’s getting a huge update soon.)

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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 — mistakes that audiobook publishers make. I always recommend that you listen to the audio sample provided at Audible.com or the iTunes Store before making a purchase; audiobooks can be expensive, and mistakes add up to real money fast.

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 your own computers. For normal people, it’s a look at how much effort it still is to create audiobooks that behave as you’d expect and desire in iTunes and on an iPod.

The Motivation

But before seeing the tedious steps, here’s the why of it. Audiobooks processed as I do below are easier to organize and navigate, and they behave the way I want them to, instead of behaving as individual tracks.

For example, in iTunes Grid view, each audiobook’s tracks are grouped into a single item:

Similarly, in List view with the Artwork column shown, the audiobook tracks are correctly grouped together:

But where my “perfect” audiobooks really shine is on my iPhone (the interface is the same on the iPod Touch). The audiobook appears as one entry in the Audiobooks section of the iPod application, with three “episodes,” and clicking on it displays those episodes:

When playing back the audiobook I see almost full screen cover art, or chapter art if there is any:

And perhaps best of all, clicking on the list icon (top right, just under the battery indicator) displays the chapter list, making navigation through the book a breeze. Just tap on a chapter to start playing back right there:

(Unfortunately, the “classic” iPods, even the latest ones, don’t handle audiobooks as well as the iPhone and iPod Touch. Mostly, it shows every track for an audiobook as an entry in the Audiobooks menu, which can be hundreds of items long, a major pain. But you can at least reduce the pain by consolidating a book down to a track or two, as described here.)

The Process

I started with the CDs of an audiobook, specifically, the 20 CDs for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows read by the magnificent Stephen Fry:

I use an application called Audiobook Builder, which is unfortunately available only for the Mac. There are audiobook importing applications for Windows, but none that I’ve seen give you both ease of use and the amount of control that Audiobook Builder does.

I create a new project, using custom settings that provide a reasonable trade-off between audio quality and disk space (these settings approximate my recommended settings for importing audiobooks in iTunes):

After pasting in the cover art on the first screen, the initial import of the CDs happens in the Chapters panel. This is accomplished by repeatedly clicking the Import CD button, and sticking in the next CD. 20 times for 20 CDs. This takes a while.

The result is a chapters list where each chapter is composed of the tracks from a single CD, which does not correspond to the actual chapters in the book. In the case of the Harry Potter books, the initial chapters list is wildly incorrect (no screenshot for this stage, sorry), and the process of correctly grouping them is tedious, especially if the imported tracks didn’t get useful names applied to them when looked up in the Gracenote CDDB database — which will be the case for most audiobooks. In those cases, I literally play the start of every track, listening for the chapter announcements, because I want proper chapters:

Most audiobooks don’t have chapter art, or at least, don’t have chapter art that I make an effort to preserve. The Harry Potter books are different (and I’m an OCD anal-retentive type), so I painstakingly collected artwork and sequence information from various web sites, and pasted graphics into the chapter art box, at the bottom right of the above screen, for each chapter.

Finally, it’s time to build the audiobook. While this can be a single click operation…

…my preference is to build audiobook files as long as possible, but to have all tracks in a single audiobook be approximately the same. Also, Audiobook Builder limits you to tracks no longer than 12 hours. So, there’s math involved, dividing the audiobook into equal chunks no longer than 12 hours, and then fiddling with Audiobook Builder’s Maximum Track Length preference to set the desired track length:

This really shouldn’t be necessary, and if the developers of Audiobook Builder would like some advice, I would suggest that rather than a manual setting (which I have to tweak for every audiobook), this setting should be a choice between “Make parts which are no longer than xxx” (with the slider controlling xxx), and “Make all parts approximately the same length.” And there should be an additional setting, “Do not break chapters across parts.” I hate that, and currently it’s nearly inevitable in books with long chapters.

Once I click the Build Audiobook button, I sit back and wait for the audiobook tracks to get joined together, artwork embedded, etc. Eventually the book is built, and automatically added to iTunes. In iTunes I do one last step, using File > Get Info to set the Media Kind and some playback options:

OK! Done! Sync to my iPhone, and away I go!

Advanced Steps

OK, as if the above steps were not enough work, for some books, I add another, really painful step in the middle. Namely, when a book has chapters that break across CDs, there’s usually an audible intro on the next CD, something like “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, disk four. Chapter seven, continued.” Useful for people who are swapping CDs to listen, but useless on an iPhone, where I have 12 hour tracks. So, for books I really want “perfect,” I will actually edit the audio tracks with the CD intros, using Rogue Amoeba’s Fission:

(Hard to tell in the screenshot, but I’ve selected the intro audio, and the mouse is hovering over the Remove button.) Yes, this is a pain in the butt. No, it’s not worth it. Yes, I have to do it, for some books…

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 useful.

But the best source for audiobook releases news I’ve found are the RSS feeds offered by Audible.com. They have feeds for the latest releases, but they also have feeds for best sellers from various lists (NYTimes, etc.), best sellers in various categories, and feeds for specially priced titles, including free content. Audible’s feeds used to be awful, abbreviated entries that were almost useless. But at some point they got a whole lot better, and now tell you the book title, author, and give the full description for the book. They even link to an audio sample of the book, for you to listen to before you buy. Since Audible has the largest catalog of audiobooks, this is about as comprehensive a source as you can find.

Unfortunately, while I would like to link directly to Audible’s feeds page, their horrible web site makes it impossible to directly link to some pages, including that one. So I can only describe how to navigate there yourself.

1. Start at the Audible.com home page.
2. Scroll down to the bottom of the page.
3. Click the “RSS” link, which looks like this:

Find a feed that appeals to you, and subscribe to it in your usual newsreader, e.g., Google Reader, NewsGator’s excellent readers, etc. (If you don’t know what a newsreader or RSS feed is, this What is RSS? article is a pretty good introduction.)

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 clear to me how OverDrive protects the downloaded content, enforces lending period constraints, or otherwise restricts the use of audiobooks downloaded using their system. Some of the instructions and FAQs make it sound a little cumbersome, and generally content producers (the audiobook publishers) require pretty strong restrictions. So I’m a little hesitant to install the new software on my computer (I really need to get a test system…), fearing some hidden DRM kernel extension, or other invasive software.

It’s also not clear to me how much content is available to the new Media Console, at least in the MP3 format supported for Mac users. The older WMA format is much more broadly enabled, as it includes DRM restrictions that publishers are comfortable with. But you can search OverDrive’s national directory of libraries and see if content is available from a library or other source near you.

If you give it a try, let me know how it works for you. Otherwise, I’ll try to give it a whirl in the new year, and post an updated then.

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? With the release of iTunes 8, I can replace hundreds of (a thousand?) words with a single screen shot:

Well, maybe a few words are still in order. Here’s the new process, which will work every time:

1. Import your audiobook using your favorite process, in your favorite audio format. (I’ve written detailed instructions for both standard Audio CD audiobooks and for MP3 CD audiobooks.)
2. Select the imported track(s) in iTunes, and choose File > Get Info, and then click on the Options tab, to get to the Track Info Options panel.
3. From the Media Kind pop-up menu, choose “Audiobook”.
4. Check the Remember playback position and Skip when shuffling options.
5. Click the OK button.

From now on, iTunes, iPods, and iPhones will all treat the track(s) as full audiobooks, including remembering playback position automatically (saving your “bookmark”), skipping the track when you’re playing a random shuffle of music, and allowing you to speed up or slow down playback with the Settings > Audiobooks speed options on your iPod or iPhone.

Note: When you make the above changes, the audiobook track(s) will be moved from the Music source list to the Audiobooks source list. If you haven’t enabled the Audiobooks list, it will seem as though your tracks have disappeared. See Optimal iTunes Import Settings for Audiobooks for more details of enabling the Audiobooks source list.

If you’re interested in more of the details of what’s new in iTunes 8, I suggest iLounge’s Instant Expert: Secrets & Features of iTunes 8 as the best and most detailed guide I’ve seen.

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 listening to audiobooks, you of course want both Repeat and Shuffle turned off. On standard iPods, you do this in the main settings menu, and it’s effective for all tracks. But on the iPhone, as Dan explains and illustrates, the setting is harder to find, until you know where it is, and can be turned on and off while fiddling with your place in a track. See Dan’s full post for the details.

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 publishing the recordings on a regular, sequential basis. A chapter a week is a common pattern. Interested listeners can download the recordings and listen to them on their computer, iPod, whatever. For free.

The best news is that iTunes can make receiving the periodic recordings totally automatic. Once you subscribe to the author’s podcast, the chapters will be downloaded automatically as published, and can even be automatically transferred to your iPod. Very slick.

The article has more details about the hows and whys, including references to the podcasts for several authors who got started podcasting, but are now professionally published, so it’s not just “hey, look at this cool technology” informative, it’s also got direct links to new authors and books for you to check out.