How do you manage and organize your audiobooks?

[tempest@de]

I use caliber for my bought eBooks, so when in doubt if I own a certain book I can check it there quickly. I now started buying audiobooks and have yet to find a way to list them and manage them, so I would like to know how you do it, so I can get inspired and address this before they pile up and the task gets more difficult.

Do you download your books (the non DRM) or you keep them in the various providers / apps?

Do you keep track of your purchases in the various providers?

[pwalker8]

I buy the vast majority of my audiobooks from audible. I use iTunes on my mac to manage my audiobooks. I would love to have a calibre for audiobooks, but that doesn't really seem to exist at the moment. Who knows, maybe I'll get around to writing something. iTunes lets me export my list of audiobooks, which I then load into a spreadsheet for easy access when I'm away from my computer.

I download and format convert all my audiobooks for backup purposes. Moving them to MP3's also allows me to put them in playlist when I listen in the car. It's not exactly perfect, but it works well enough.

[princeyann]

Zip them and add to Calibre as an alternative format.

[Tarana]

I liberate all my audiobooks and sort them by folder Genre--> Author. I have nearly 1000 audiobooks and found Calibre was an easy way to not only catalog them but to have a description of what the story is about. Create a separate library and use the Empty book function to create one. I added a separate column to indicate where I bought it from (CD, Audible, etc.). I originally used a spreadsheet, but having that meta with the description was so much better, IMHO. I listened to an audiobook while assembling the Calibre Audiobook Library.

If I didn't liberate my audiobooks, I wouldn't buy any. I had audiobooks disappear from my Itunes account, B&N stopped selling or maintaining audiobooks, several publishers remove books from your library a few years after they stop selling them or the company goes bust without warning. I have never had a problem with Audible (a book disappeared, but they brought it back as soon as I asked). However, there is no guarantee that rules won't change or the company remains solvent in 5 years.

edited to add: FWIW, I archive using just Mp3 today. My later Ipods and nanos handle it well. Also, duplicates can be an issue. Fortunately, I have only accidentally bought one book twice; others were deliberate because of change of narrators or to replace the audiobooks Itunes took out (they returned to my account 5 or 6 years later).

[CRussel]

I liberate all my Audible now, across four accounts (Mine, wife's, a UK one, and an old, dormant one that never got tied to Amazon.) But while there's a plugin for Calibre that supposedly can handle Audible/MP3/M4B, I've never really found it suitable. A good audio book plugin for Calibre would definitely get my attention (and some $$). I'd prefer to not separate audio books from eBooks, mostly because I often have both for a title, and I want to see them in the same view.

[tempest@de]

Thank you all for sharing your experiences, I like the idea of using calibre, as I’m familiar with it and it allows me to access quickly a lot of information about the book, I’ll try both ways, adding the entry without book, and adding a zip file to see how it goes.

Silly me I didn’t know it was possible to liberate the audiobooks, I would like to do this, in case the provider goes out of business or something happens, sadly we’ve seen it happen often enough, I keep a copy of every ebook I ever bought, so I would like to do the same for the audiobooks.

I did a search on google about how to liberate the audiobooks and found a lot of programs, do you have any recommendation about a program to do it? Which one do you use?

[icedtea]

Originally Posted by tempest@de

I did a search on google about how to liberate the audiobooks and found a lot of programs...

I recently backed up my tiny collection (less than 10) of audiobooks with Open (name of service).

It worked well. My longest book is over 30 hours, and that one was the longest job at 40 minutes.

Pro/Con (depending on how you view it) - the program worked without me needing to install the desktop manager. You sign into your account via the program's built in browser, to download the source files, then convert.

Even the huge 30-something hour book converted into one file, which I liked. If you don't like this, then I guess you'd also need to split the converted file.

If you don't feel comfortable signing in, I think the other 2 popular options use your already downloaded files from the desktop manager.

[haertig]

I use Calibre for audiobooks. Each book is a sequence of mp3 files, and a cover.jpg file. I zip these up into bookname.zip and Calibre handles that just fine. I also add a tag in Calibre for "audiobook", so I can easily find them in my collection of books. Most of my collection is eBooks, but I'm starting to grow my audiobooks now.

[angelyne]

I use Calibre as well, as it's the best option out there. But I have been endlessly frustrated by the lack of metadata support for audiobook books. It wouldn't be that hard to tweak the amazon meta-data download plugin to fetch the audio version of a book, but I can't seem to generate any interest for this project. It's surprising since audiobooks are becoming more and more popular. I myself lack the programming skills to attempt this. But if Calibre was to support meta-download of audiobooks, it would be perfect for the task.

Edit: If someone feels comfortable with a bit of programming Kovid said it would be "easy enough" to tweak the amazon plugin to prioritize audiobooks instead of paper versions

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=311524