Last school year, I told our Student Council we’d be working on getting iPod Shuffles for the LRC to checkout with our minimal audiobook collection. However, the lack of LCD screen to guide a reader is as irritating as the file format issues (an audiobook in iTunes needs to be an .m4b file).
Other schools in my district are using the Creative Zen and other MP3 players which have a bookmarking feature. While I am interested in this, I have already invested lots of time and money getting audiobooks onto iTunes and synced up with our iPod Classics. Unfortunately, the remaining host of audiobooks on CD have sat in a bag waiting for “time” (I don’t have) to change them over.
An early December post from CNet, however, gave me new hope! Taking an audiobook from CD to iPod is now quite easy with iTunes 8. Using their photo guidance I practiced with personal copies of Shel Silverstein audio CDs that came with books and I was up and running in minutes! As a result, my wife transferred all of my daughter’s audiobook CDs onto her old iPod Mini this morning.
iTunes/iPod can Bookmark…sort of
While the bookmarking feature is useful and one Apple should integrate, there are many benefits to using audiobooks with iTunes:
- Audiobooks are automatically bookmarked: if you stop an audiobook in the middle and play something else, then go back to the audiobook, it will start playing where you left off – even after resynchronizing your iPod.
- The main menu has a direct Audiobooks entry.
- You can play audiobooks faster or slower than normal speed.
- Audiobooks can have chapter stops within them.
- Audiobooks are automatically skipped during all music shuffle.
(These ideas and direct quotes taken from Ed’s Tech Tips)
Recommendations
Regardless of what route you take, I think the following are useful ideas:
- IF you’re using an MP3 player with a simple LCD screen, it can be helpful to label your tracks with information about the book: title acronym, series number (if applicable), chapter number, and chapter title/description (e.g. Ranger’s Apprentice, Book One: The Ruins of Gorland by John Flanagan = RA_bk1-ch00-Prologue).
- If you’re using a video capable MP3 player, I’d add “artwork” for the cover of the book.
- If a chapter is several tracks long, you might want to combine the tracks into one file. This requires another program to manage, but in iTunes, you can highlight the tracks then choose Advanced menu → Join Tracks
Enjoy! 
