Audible sells audiobooks (books read aloud, if you didn’t deduce). Audiobooks are cheaper than print books on the whole because the cost of producing them (beyond the actual writing and editing) is simply the cost of hiring a single voice artist, as opposed to printing each copy. In other words, it has enormous operating leverage. (On the other hand, buying these in disks in the store can be quite pricey.) Therefore, if you commit to one of Audible’s plans, such as the monthly or “all-at-once” plans, you can get an excellent deal on these things. For example, the “24 credits all at once plan” (the most economical if you use it to its full) gets you each book for $7.50. I happen to listen to them on my way to and from work in the car, which is usually about an hour each way. Most audiobooks last a week or so for me. (You can get more bang for your buck with subscriptions to the New Yorker, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.)
While I’m talking about audible, before I get to my Linux experience, I might as well tell you what I think of the site. I think it’s an excellent service, overall, and a huge boon in the modern commuting age. I had previously bought about a month’s worth of audiobooks (it was four all together, I believe) for about $100 at Barnes & Noble’s; through Audible, this would have cost at most $45. Their site leaves something to be desired; it is something of a poor man’s amazon.com. Of course, you can research the books you want on Amazon, and then just check if Audible has them. The files have DRM protection, but it’s no problem using them on an iPod or in iTunes, which is all most people care about. They also force you to use a proprietary download software, which presumably encrypts and tags the files as you retrieve them. My prediction is that both the clunky website and the DRM will go the way of the dodo once Amazon takes over (they’re being bought by Amazon; my prediction is purely speculation, of course).
Which brings me to the purpose of my post. Given that the proprietary, windows (and perhaps Mac) download program, Linux is officially unsupported. However, on my Ubuntu machine (version 7.10 at the moment), I had no problem downloading and installing both their “AudibleManager” (which can organize and play your audiobooks) and “Audible Download Manager” (which downloads the files outside of AudibleManager) using Wine (see Wine’s AppDB for support information). I used Wine straight out of the box, and had to use the short script described on the AppDB page referenced above; now it integrates very nicely with firefox. Make sure you have Audible Download Manager running before you try to download, otherwise the download won’t work. Note that the podcasts page does not work for me in the audible download manager; you have to download the files through the Audible website using the library (since only subscriptions can be downloaded directly through the download manager, this isn’t such a hassle, anyway).
Now that you have these files, what do you do? You can listen to them using the AudibleManager, which plays audio, and recognizes the chapter markers. Amazingly, Amarok not only recognizes the .aa files (although it cannot play them), but can download them to your iPod. I don’t think any other ipod program recognizes the .aa files, so Amarok (which is just an awesome program, by the way) may be the only way to do this. However, on my new 3g iPod nano (supported in Ubuntu 7.10 only by installing a libgpod hack, although it should work officially starting next month with 8.04) these downloaded files play fine, although they lose the chapter information. This isn’t such a big deal, though, since you can fast forward and rewind easily enough by pressing the middle button and then scrolling (a technique that does not seem to work at all when a file has chapters).
So, although Audible has no official plans of supporting linux, the linux community seems to have done a superb job of making things work. To recap, to use audible in linux, you need to:
- Install Wine and Amarok (if you want to download to an ipod)
- Install the audible download manager or the AudibleManager (to listen on the computer) using Wine
- Use the shell script suggested on the AppDB page to integrate the download manager properly with firefox.
- Start the audible download manager, go to your audible library, download, and enjoy!
