Why am I telling you this? Because Audiobooks has just launched an audiobook flatrate service that lets you listen to as many audiobooks as you like for $24.95 per month. The store features more than 10,000 audiobooks right now, with new books being added on a regular basis.

How does it work? You visit the website and sign-up for a free trial account. You now have seven days to test the site and its functionality.

The homescreen displays the books that you are currently reading, recommendations based on your preferences, new arrivals, and staff picks.

When you hover the mouse over a listing, a short description is displayed. A click takes you to the audiobook’s profile page that features a larger description as well as information about the play time, narrators, version, genre and publication date. You may also see user comments and ratings on the page which can further aid you in determining whether you’d like to start listening to that particular audiobook.

You can preview audiobooks here, which may be useful to get a feeling for the quality of the audiobook, or start playing the full version right away.

Audiobooks open in a new window with basic controls that allow you to stop and pause the playback, rewind or forward 30 seconds, and to add bookmarks which is useful if you want to continue from a specific position the next time you play the audiobook.

The player was developed using HTML5 which ensures that it is not only compatible with desktop PCs but also with many mobile devices that support HTML5 audio.

The site features a search that you can use to find specific books, authors or narrators. You can alternatively browse the audiobook collection by genre in case you are interested in a specific topic. Categories include history, non-fiction, comedy, politics and science & technology among others.

Tastes differ but it is not difficulty to find audiobooks that suite your taste. From Steve Jobs’ biography over Russian language instructions to marketing audiobooks and bestsellers such as Dan Brown’s Deception Point or Bond Girl: A Novel by Robin Gwyne.

There is also a bestseller listing of 50 bestselling audiobooks for fast access.

The Good

As many audiobooks as you can listen to for $24.95. If you are buying at least one audiobook a month, you will certainly enjoy the service as it gives you access to thousands over thousands of books for the price of one. Plus, you can listen to the audio books not only on your desktop PC, but on mobile devices like tablets or the iPhone.

You can browse and search the selection of books prior to signing up, which can be useful to make sure that the books you are interested in are offered on the site.

The bitrate is rather low, but still acceptable, and it means that less data needs to be transferred to the computer.

The Bad

You need to keep in mind that all audiobooks are streamed which means that you cannot make use of the service in situations where you do not have Internet or only limited Internet connectivity. If you like to listen to an audiobook during travel for instance, you may not be able to make use of the service in that situation. And since there is no way to download an audiobook to your computer, you still may need to purchase some audiobooks in CD format.

The service is also only offered to users from the United States at this point in time.

There is also no option to listen to audiobooks while offline.

Verdict

If you are living in the United States and purchasing audiobooks regularly, you may be interested to try out the new Audiobooks.com service. This service is mainly for computer and smartphone users who listen to audiobooks on their devices though.

I personally like the idea of an audiobook flatrate, and would welcome it if the developers would add offline listening capabilities to their service.

Audiobook Sleep is a lightweight application that has been created with the Autohotkey software and published on a request at the Donation Coder forum. It can be downloaded right from the developer’s website. The full program has a size of only 211 Kilobytes after unpacking, a click on AudioBookSleep.exe will start the interface.

While it surely does look like any other shutdown sleep timer it comes with a feature that makes it a tad more interesting to use. It makes use of Minicap or more precisely minicap.exe which has to be placed into the same folder as the audiobook sleep software program. Placing minicap.exe into the same folder will make the software create a screenshot of the computer system’s desktop before the shutdown process.

What does that mean? You not only get an application that shuts down the computer system after a certain amount of time but also a screenshot of your computer desktop displaying the play time of the audiobook. Next time you want to play the audiobook you start looking at the screenshot to check the play time and start listening from that position.

The problem that I was facing now was that my mp3 player has a limited storage capacity of four Gigabytes. With audiobooks growing in size all the time it is not that unusual to encounter some that would use up to 500 Megabytes and more of space on that mp3 player.

I therefor came to the conclusion that the best way to prepare my audiobooks was to reduce their quality. While it naturally reduces the quality of the recording it does not reduce it that much in my opinion that you would stop enjoying the audiobook. The benefit of course is a reduced file size.

A normal audio CD encoded with 128 Kbps uses about 50-70 Megabytes of space on the hard drive with a playtime between 50 and 70 minutes. An audiobook encoded with 32 Kbps has a size of a little bit more than 20 Megabytes with a playtime of nearly 90 minutes. If you encode it with 64 Kbps instead it uses the same 20 Megabytes for a playtime that is halved.

I won’t be telling you which quality level you should choose because frankly taste is different. If you prefer a better quality encode them that way, if you can live with 32 Kbps do that and save lots of space.

The software that I’m using for this type of conversions is called MP3 Reduce II but you can use almost any audio software out there. MP3 Reduce II has the advantage that you simply select the source file, the encoding quality and the destination file. The only problem that I have with it is that you can only select one file at a time.

Another way would be to merge all mp3 files and save them as one big file at the end. Audacity can do that for instance, just copy paste all files next to each other and save the selection as a new mp3 file.

If you prefer the command line you can use the command copy /b audio1.mp3 + audio2.mp3 result.mp3. It won’t be perfect but it could be enough for the next roadtrip.

I was able to reduce the size of an audiobook with a playing time of 670 minutes from 600 Megabyte to 150 Megabyte this way.

It is however possible to convert your mp3 audiobooks into the m4b format to enable those two features. Another advantage is that audiobooks are normally available as many small mp3 files which will be merged into one big m4b file in the process. You can use the Open Source program MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter to make as many conversions as you like.

Once installed you simply add all parts of the same audiobook to the list of mp3′s that will be converted. Make sure they are in the correct order, it would not be that nice if the playback would jump around in the chapters because of this. It took about eight minutes to convert the mp3 files of one audiobook CD into one m4b format.

The output size was a little bit astonishing. The original mp3 files had a size of nearly 100 megabytes while the new m4b file had a third of that file size. 34 Megabytes instead of 100 Megabytes was an incredible reduction without noticeable loss of quality.

It should also be noted that there is a difference in quality. Human readers are of course capable of narrating the story in a higher quality than a computer reader can ever achieve. The following websites offer high quality Audiobooks that can be downloaded for free to your computer. I try to list some of the most remarkable books from those sites next to the link to give you an impression about the content that they offer:

Thought Audio – good collection of mostly classic novels such as Metamorphosis from Kafka and Thus Spoke Zarathustra from Nietzsche.
Free Classic Audiobooks – offers Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and Treasure Island by Stevenson.
Pink Geek Audio – If you like Sherlock Holmes you have come to the right place. Has a large concentration of Sherlock Holmes books.
Simply Audiobooks – The Waste Land by Eliot and The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Just some books but good quality.
Podiobooks – Podiobooks are serialized Audiobooks that are offered in Podcast format. You won’t find classic books here but only books from unknown authors.
Voices in the Dark – Large collection of Audiobooks from authors such as H.G. Wells and Edgar Allen Poe.

Do you know more sources for free Audiobooks that are read by humans ? Let me know, always looking for more.

I bet you are asking yourself what you can expect from the audiobook section of Project Gutenberg. Lots of high quality audiobooks read by skilled natives. Let me name a few authors and books that caught my attention in first place: Hans Christian Andersen, Jane Austen, Balzac, Joseph Conrad, Descartes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Goethe, Kafka, Jack London, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker and Mark Twain.

Lots of famous classic novels that are worth the download if you ask me. The only drawback that I could find was that the files are encoded with a maximum of 32 Kbit which is not that of a problem for audiobooks and that they are split in different parts that have to be downloaded separately. I would say that there are currently more than 100 audiobooks available that can be downloaded free of charge.