I’ve mostly got my process down, but there continue to be new levels of dumb to deal with. As it stands, the process goes something like:

1. Buy an audiobook. Generally, this is on CD because I trust Audible about as much as I trust Ubisoft, and for the exact same reason.
2. Rip the discs to high-quality MP3. On OSX I use Max, and on Windows I built a custom version of CDex to support disc numbers.
3. Queue up all of the individual tracks and play the first few seconds of each, looking for chapter breaks. For the breaks, title the track something smart like 4: The Leaky Cauldron.
4. Use the audiobookify Perl script I wrote to bundle tracks into chapters and convert from MP3 to M4B format so that I get nice chapter markers, cover art, etc. (And because pretty much every device plays M4B at this point.)

It’s a real PITA most of the time, but manageable. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, the CDDB titles for the tracks will be something like Chapter 4c so I don’t have to manually scan and tag.

But sometimes it’s just profoundly dumb.

Some audiobook producers (Blackstone, for one) think it’s amusing to disregard the actual spoken breaks in the book and instead use some fixed amount, such as tracks every 3 minutes. Some producers find it necessary to use all 99 available tracks on a CD. Some include intro and outro music on each disc. Some include a minute or two of the end of the previous disc as the start of the next disc (and then don’t put the overlap into its own track). Some audiobooks are only available as giant disc-length MP3 files with no breaks at all.

Why am I so hung up on chapter breaks? I spend most of my time listening to audiobooks while running. Trying to manage iPod volume and sport accoutrements while running involves a whole lot of fumbling. Occasionally, I’ll accidentally hit the track forward or back buttons. This is compounded by the length of audiobooks, which are often packaged into 5½ hour chunks, owing to a longstanding iPod firmware issue that does hinky things with longer audiobooks. Without proper breaks, scanning through a 5½ hour file is a nontrivial task.

When I am confronted with such lunacy, the easiest solution I’ve found is:

1. Join together all of the track files into one giant file.
2. Use mp3splt to find likely chapter breaks based on silence. But since I can’t under-split, as it would offend my delicate sensibilities to have 18 of 20 chapters marked, I have to over-split. And mp3splt is a bit of a hammer, so you have to really over-split. I find that a 20:1 ratio is what generally works: for every 1 chapter in the audiobook, split the book into 20 parts.
3. Pick up on step 3 above.

I occasionally run into audiobooks that are just a bit too long to fit neatly into 5½ hour chunks. In such a case, SoX has functionality to let you change tempo without changing pitch, which works well on audiobooks. I’ve found that speeding up most audiobooks up to 20% is almost negligible for impacting comprehension. This is also useful for the narrators that are just a bit too slow for my liking.

I’ve been looking into speech recognition software to help me out. You would think that it would be trivial: obtain an electronic text of the book, give the audio and the text to some magical program that parses the speech and associates timecodes with the text, and then do a phenome search for words like chapter, book, and part.

Unfortunately, it looks like that magical software doesn’t exist yet. The closest thing might be Google Audio Indexing, the technology that powers Google Voice. But as near as I can tell, it’s not for public use yet. Something might be built atop CMU Sphinx, but it would take a significant effort.

Oh, and on a side note: M4B files will upload to Google Music (with some limitations on file size), but are automagically converted to MP3 format on their servers, thus removing any chapter breaks. Amazon’s Cloud Player does not yet support M4B files.

Side note the second: a 5-hour M4B file of decent quality weighs in at around 100MB. Even really long audiobooks, Neal Stephenson’s Anathem for example, don’t generally run more than 30-35 hours. You could fit even that entire book as a series of 7 M4B files on a single CD. Up that to a 1GB flash drive and get ridiculous audio quality instead of just decent. And again, pretty much every device supports M4B files these days. Or, you know, you could go on selling a 2lb stack of 28 CDs.

My wife loves her new Sony Reader Touch. She’s got it synced up to check out books from the local library. She prints web pages and documents to PDF so that she can get to them from anywhere in a few seconds. She tried buying a book from the Sony store … but that didn’t work out so well.

But the burr under the saddle has been schoolbooks.

Her university has a partnership with a couple of different ebook retailers, but most of her books end up on iChapters, a.k.a. Cengage Brain. In theory, iChapters is an awesome business model: break up a textbook into ebook chapters and allow students to buy or rent them individually. For example, look at the prices for one of her textbooks, Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge, 12ed:

That particular book has 16 chapters. At $8 each, buying them individually would be only negligibly cheaper than buying the whole book outright. But some of her classes only require a handful of chapters, making individual chapters an absolute steal.

… and too good to be true.

It turns out that iChapters does a little bit of a bait-n-switch. The sample chapters are in PDF format, but the paid-for chapters are in SPDF format—a “sealed” PDF, slathered in DRM. Really, the SPDF file extension is misdirection: Acrobat can’t read it. You need an Acrobat Reader plugin to “unseal” (read: unencrypt) the PDF. This isn’t the DRM that Adobe built into PDFs. That DRM is pretty much transparent, and works flawlessly with the Sony Reader. Library ebooks use the built-in Adobe DRM to time out after 2-3 weeks, when the physical book would have to be returned.

No, let me be perfectly clear: iChapters SPDF files can only be read on your computer. They can’t be read on any eReader: the Sony Reader, Nook, Kindle, or what have you.

Better yet, the unsealer plugin disables printing to PDF (as you figure it would).
… and the files are watermarked on every single page with a large background image right in the middle—behind the text and diagrams making them tricky to read.
… and absolutely no conversion of formatting has been done—books that are formatted badly on paper, requiring lots of flipping back and forth, retain the bad formatting and now require jogging back and forth with the scroll bar.
… and the PDFs aren’t optimized: they are huge files with 300dpi images and layers obscured by other layers.
… and many of the images and text blocks have been removed, with large “unavailable due to copyright restriction” messages. (wtf, really?)
… and, oh yeah, the chapters are really rentals, too. The license to read them times out, even though you don’t learn that until after you “buy”.

In short: excellent idea, horrible execution.

All this can be yours … for $0.50 per page. I pity the fools rushing out to buy an iPad as an eBook reader. If they think the user experience is going to be any better … ha!

I get the feeling that eBooks are now where MP3s were 10 years ago. I had the same experiences trying to buy MP3s to put on my Rio back then. We’ll get to a point where people stop being stupid … but it’s going to take a few more years.

Anyone who knows me well won’t be surprised to find that my version of a “Precious” isn’t an iPhone but rather an eReader.

Silly husband didn’t ask me to restrain myself at B&N when we were Christmas shopping, so I have three purchased books (100 Heartbeats: The Race to Save Earth’s Most Endangered Species, Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways To Greet the Day, and The Botany of Desire) waiting for me, competing with the stack of library books about gardening that I’d checked out the week before. The library finally corrected my address so all the books I had on hold were ferried to my doorstep a few at a time in shiny blue packages in the days leading up to Christmas.

My book ennui was just lifting and I was plowing through my book pile, several at a time, when I got my Christmas gift.

I got my Precious on Christmas eve, pre-loaded with too many books for one human to possibly read in one sitting (more than a dozen from the hubby) and got comfy on the couch. Eventually, hubby convinced me to dock the thing and actually check the Sony store, Google Books, and the library websites.

Yikes. 46 books loaded. A dozen started almost immediately.

This is book gluttony.

So, yeah. The Reader, much like a newborn, has barely been set down.

It gives me the same trouble in dim lighting that my own eyes do, but other than that, the functionality on this baby is awesome. We had played with the Reader and the Nook prior to purchase, and this is just … the best.

You can highlight, bookmark, search, circle, annotate, define words and otherwise mark up your ebooks. You can create PDF documents of, say, a map to your relatives, and save for review when driving on the highway down to Rockledge. You can add music, you can use the stylus to draw pictures, you can type little memos to yourself reminding you of all the other books you want to look for. Best of all, you’ve got the ability to add external memory (SD card or something else; two options) so you can swap out libraries… and it all fits in my (very normal-sized) purse!!!

Hubby threatens metrics generation to see just how many books I am in the middle of… I think the Kindle actually offers those onscreen on the device. I’ve already finished a couple of books, and other than exceptionally badly formatted PDFs, they’re awesome… I just zoom in and out for ease of reading in different lighting.

Yeah, I heart my Precious. Like, whoa.