Audiobooks discussion

I posted this at the Feedback group a few minutes ago in case you would like to add your comments or support there for greater reach and exposure among the Goodreads staff. We'd like to hear you comments here as well but in all honesty you'd just be preaching to the choir.
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I have been looking forward to this feature and the wait has been worth it!

I do have one concern...for us audiofiles (shameless plug), how are we to easily indicate our progress?

If we're designating the book correctly as an audio edition, then we don't get a "number of pages" which is used as the base for which the progress percentage is determined.

This wonderful progress bar stresses the need to have a field for "total minutes" for audiobooks. Further, while not needed for the progress bar, we would still like to have a field for "narrators name" as well. The ability to search for titles by narrator would be awesome.

We audiobookers know of the debate of whether listening really counts as reading but we are not the ugly step-sisters of Goodreads and feel strongly about having equal consideration.

To semi-quote John Merrick (The Elephant Man), "We are not animals, we are human beings, and Goodreaders like everyone else here!" :-)

Seriously, any suggestions to help us with the progress bar calculation and consideration in adding these additional fields is greatly appreciated.

Continuing my thought on this topic, I posted this at the Feedback group a few minutes ago in case as audiobook loyalists you would like to add your comments or support there for greater reach and exposure among the Goodreads staff. Hopefully this is a change we can push through...Voice your support for change at the feedback group if you think this would be useful. Remember: the squeaky wheel gets the grease!
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Just had this idea for the audiobook issue...what if on the "edit book" page (I guess that limits this to librarians), the wording for "number of pages" was simply changed to "length of book"? Then just have a small box to indicate whether the field represents "pages" (which should be the default) or "minutes" for audio. That way the math is not affected in the progress calculations and the text is easily picked up by the box checked.

I've done this with FDR's Folly on my profile under currently reading as an example. The progress bar shown is correct but the verbiage states "page" 352 of 566. Instead, it should read "minute" 352 of 566 which could be compensated for by the check box in the proposed "length of book" field instead of the current "pages" as discussed above.

Whaddya think?

Your fix might work, but as you say, you'd need librarian status. How many would that impact? And although it's easy, I wonder how many folks would take the time to convert hours to minutes? Another form of "discrimination" is that there seems to be no way to do a search on reviews and limit those to only reviews of audiobooks. It drives me crazy to plow through a couple of hundred reviews just to find the one audiobook review I know is in there.If there's a way to do this and I'm just missing it, please let me know. I applaud your efforts to make goodreads work better for audiobook users.

Yeah, one problem is that depending on what format I'm listening to (CD, mp3, etc.) I think in terms of minutes, disks, or tracks. I don't really want to have to do algebra to update a status bar.

A simpler option might just be to indicate % done. I could estimate that pretty easily from any format.

Jamie wrote: "... A simpler option might just be to indicate % done. I could estimate that pretty easily from any format. "

Thankfully, this is now an option.