Right that makes sense re. size, I didn't think of that - I would say that may even be a smart factor for Kobo to leverage (if they chose to go down this route) to encourage people to buy larger capacity versions of their e-readers.
On the topic of time to listen vs. read - I've been using the Overcast Podcast app (not audiobooks per se, but related) which has a smart speed feature which dynamically shortens silences and it'll speed up or slow down around a chosen speed (e.g., 1.5x) to minimize distortion. Apparently this feature has saved me 41 hours of listening time... Something like this would definitely be on my wish-list for an audiobook player (which I find
way more listenable than iBooks 1.5x chipmunking for example).
Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
Have you compared the size of an audio book files to the same book as an epub ebook? The HQ audio books I've seen average around 29MB per hour and an average length between 8 and 13 hours so between 232MB and 364MB (72,000 to 117,000 words). On an 8GB device with about 5.2GB available for user files, that would allow about 14-22 audiobooks. On a 32GB device, with 29.2GB for user files, that would allow about 82-128 audiobooks. If you go to the lower quality files offered by some sources, you can get about twice as many books into the same storage. I don't even want to think about how big the Lord of the Rings trilogy in audiobook form would be -- the trilogy totals about 455,125 words so about 50.5 hours to read.
The other issue for me is how slow audiobooks are. At 150 WPM which seems to be average for a non-chipmunked audiobook, it would take ~7 times longer for me to listen to an audiobook compared to the time to read the ebook.
As usual, YMMV.
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