I’ve been listening to audiobooks from my local library via OverDrive and OneClick, tried Scribd, and today found that TuneIn now has audiobooks. More often than not, it seems the chapter lengths are 3 - 6 minutes in length. This makes the books at least 100 - 150 chapters in length. Why would they be broken up this way as opposed to having chapters lining up with the regular book?
No idea. My books from Audible are one audio chapter per written chapter, although sometimes the numbering is a little off – the spoken Forward is considered Chapter 1 to Audible, so the narrator will say ‘Chapter One’ when Audible is saying I’m on Chapter Two.
Still, no 100+ chapter audio books unless it was written that way.
I’m heading to Prague in October and have been doing the Pimsleur language lessons on my 18 minute commute back and forth to work. Each lesson is about 30 minutes long and I’ve got them all loaded up on my phone that connects to my Bluetooth in the car. If I don’t use my phone during the day, I can resume the lesson where I left off. But, I usually use my phone so I have to manually scroll ahead and remember the time stamp of where I was.
I’d assume that by making the chapters more bite-sized, it’s easier to alleviate those kinds of issues.
WAG Perhaps for ease of upload/download, or ease of navigation like the way old classical CDs with very long tracks would have sub-track indexes marking the beginning of certain sections.
It does seem to vary. I get books from the library on CD and it is insane sometimes.
I prefer “one track = one chapter”. Makes it easy to go back to the paper book and read when I want to.
Also, makes for a better stopping point when I get into the parking garage at work or my garage at home.
The whole point of having an audiobook format that’s different from normal audio is that it can hold your place. That’s why all the chapters can be in one file.
I know Audible uses m4b (aka MP4 audio books) for its highest quality format. They just add encryption. I don’t know about these other forms. If they don’t provide bookmarks, I’d probably cheat and decrypt them and make them into m4b files.
I am recording my audio book at this time. In the comments it appears as tthough listeners have preferences. Please can you let me know; what is the longest each chapter should be? Also any comments that you have, please, about likes and dislikes. Justin
I am listening to an audiobook on CD in the car. The tracks are broken up into lengths of about 3 to 5 minutes. I too, was wondering why this was, and my theory is that if you were searching for a particular line or scene, this would make it easier to “flip” through the book, since obviously you can’t scan through the pages.
Sometimes Audible’s chapters bear no relation to the book’s chapters.
Huh! News to me. I use OverDrive from library and they come as mp3s in hour-long chunks (often stating with “Name of Book, disk six”, so same length as the original CDs),
The audiobooks I’ve gotten from iTunes, some of which are Audible, are one lonnnnng file, no bookmarks.
Years ago, many people listened to audiobooks on CD players that had no way of remembering your position if you stopped in the middle of a track. So if you wanted to start listening where you left off last time, you’d have to painstakingly rewird or fast-foward through the track you were on to find the right spot—either that or just start over again from the beginning of the track. In such a context, the short tracks make it easier to find or keep your place.
But, of course, if you’re listening on a more modern device that can remember your exact place in an audio file, there’s no advantage to having many short tracks, and some disadvantage.
Sometimes it looks as though they’ve just taken an audiobook that was originally released on CD (or cassette) and made it so that one “chapter” = one disc of the original CD release.
(I’ve gotten one or two audiobooks from Audible that still had an announcement partway through that instructed me to turn the cassette over. :))