Audiobooks - No Salvation Yet

Books on CD crop up from time to time, but its not massive for us as a music CD ripping business. It does have a part to play, indeed we have one client who has a massive audiobooks collection - nearly 300 CD equivalents. Ever since we first digitised this collection we've had a problem. To be blunt, audiobooks on iPods have been crap.

From the beginning the issues were evenly spread between iTunes and the iPod. Over the last few years Apple has made great progess on the iTunes side such that with iTunes 8 and beyond, I can't put my finger on any major faults. It seems that iTunes now handles audiobooks every bit as well as it handles music, well done Apple.

But when you sync your iPod, oh what a disappointment. Although bookmarking works better, the random nature of putting some tracks into audiobooks while leaving others in music, does appear fixed. But the basic issue remains - every single track of every audiobook is just tipped into a single pile and sorted alphabetically. the consequence of this is that every element of your talking book collection is jumbled. It isn't an over statement to say this renders audiobooks unworkable on the iPod.

So, what can be done? It doesn't seem to me that there is a good solution but until Apple fix the mess we have to do something. My first suggestion would be to manage your iPod such that there's only one book on your iPod at any time. Beyond that perhaps the only way is to rename every single track such that when they're loaded onto your iPod they fall into a sensible order.

The second route would be helped by merging the many various tracks into one single book (this is an iTunes feature). Just beware that if you do this you won't be able to jump to a favourite chapter although bookmarking will allow you to resume a book at the point where you left it.

Other than that, lobby Apple.