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Gaiman on MP3 Audio Books, Mirrormask
A reader writes: "It appears that Neil Gaiman released two of his books (Anansi Boys and American Gods) as books on CD. The interesting twist is that they are being released as MP3 - which for the world of audio books is something pretty new. ". Indeed; MP3 audio books, I think, have given the book publishers the willies because of the DRM issue - anyone else seen this before? And also worth noting that Mirrormask was released in motion picture form and rocks. I think to describe it would be equal parts The Dark Crystal and Myst, combine with Carnivale and a dash of The City of Lost Children.
I find the only Audio books that have any effect on me are the instructional kind. For instance, learning a new language such as through the Pimsleur series.
I would be interested in knowing if anyone actually prefers the audio format to traditional page flipping.
In terms of going MP3, wouldn't the author have saved a lot in fees by going OGG, or is acceptance too much of a concern?
~jennifer.k~
Audible has always used their own in-house DRM format, not MP3, so you got that wrong... (they do have a version of their file format that uses MP3 audio internally, but it is still wrapped in their DRM envelope).
You can, however, burn the books to unencrypted audio CDs...
I would be interested in knowing if anyone actually prefers the audio format to traditional page flipping.
For certain applications, I find that they're much better. Basically, they're great for "hands free" reading, in situations where you couldn't conveniently (or safely) read a book, like while exercising, doing housework, walking around (remembering to use your eyes extra carefully to subsitute for your occupied ears when, say, crossing streets).
Also, a good performance by the narrator can do great things for a book. There are some very fine voice actors reading these books, and the best of them are fantastic. Other narrators are, well, less fantastic. It's very much a personal preference issue, though: heated arguments over the quality of the narrator regularly break out in the reviews over at Audible.com. (Like another poster, I use my iPod mainly for audiobooks, and I've been doing Audible's two-books-a-month subscription plan for years, now. Not free, but affordable enough for me.)
One free audio book I can recommend is "Free Culture" by Lawrence Lessig, which a bunch of people recorded into an audio book, which was permitted by Lessig's release of the book under a Creative Commons license. You can find it over at www.legaltorrents.com. The narrators are enthusiastic rather than skilled, in some cases, but the material is so interesting that it's easy to forgive the occasional lapses.
Audio books are excellent time-fillers for long car trips, where reading a traditional book would give me motion-sickness. It's also a good way to "share" a book with other people; much like watching a movie together with your friends.
My personal favorites are audiobooks that are staged like radio drama, with multiple voice-actors and sound effects. Listening to these encourages me to use my imagination as if I was reading the book - what do the characters look like? What are they doing now? What was that "thump" just now?
Have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
I converted "Fellowship of the Ring" and "The Two Towers" to MP3 for my mom to listen to in her car. At 64kbps mono, you can comfortably fit all 15 CDs of either book to fit on one CD.
It reduces disc switching, which is a potentially serious issue when she's driving.
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It was basically Labyrinth turned inside out sans Jennifer Connely and David Bowie.
useless sig advice - Read Nabokov.
"Since virtually no-one in the world has an OGG portable player (the market I'd imagine that this guy is interested in - would you want to sit at your desk/laptop to hear a book?), it makes sense to stick with MP3."
Actually IRiver and RIO both have players that support Ogg. Yes MP3 is a more universal format so using it for a an audio book is the logical choice. Too bad none of the portable players support speex. You could put a a lot of books on a pretty small player that way.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
MP3 has always seemed like a logical medium for audio books to me. Ever since my wife and son caught the Harry Potter bug a few years ago, they will buy not only the dead-tree version, but also the audio version on CD.
Its always struck me as particularly wasteful that these things were available only as conventional audio. A single book can span 20 or more CDs.
That has always seemed somewhat wasteful to me. I'm presuming that an audio CD of a person reading a book is availing itself of the full harmonic range that would also be applied to a more elaborate production, like a symphony orchestra or a rock or jazz band that would make much fuller use of that range.
Voice telephony is based on transmitting only a narrow band of the harmonic range used by most human voice communication. Putting that narrower range together with the compression techniques available through MP3 or other similar audio formats, it seems to me that number of disks needed to store one of these books could be slashed to a small fraction of what are produced now.
This may only have a negligible effect on the final price of the item, and the popularity of MP3 enabled CD players may not have hit the critical mass needed to make this sort of thing profitable yet, but I'd think that enough popular releases, like Harry Potter or some others, might actually stimulate their adoption, or at least speed it up beyond the current rate.
But I took a look at your cited link, and you may get that portable recorder someday. Looks like there is speex support for several major DSP chip families (TI, Analog) and embedded processors (ARM) + some industry sponsorship.
I am not a crackpot.