Audiobooks discussion

I am readling or to be more exact listening to

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
by Cheryl Strayed (Goodreads Author), Bernadette Dunne (Reading)

As with my previous audiobook I have an issue with how to keep track of my progress... once again the system offers page numbers, but I have no idea what page I am on since I am listening to it.. would the appropriate people please change it for me?

I remember at one point somewhere I was asked the question on this site how I would like to keep track of my progress of audiobooks. It was some kind of a questionnaire... am I missing something about this page thing or how do you guys know what page you are on? Why would that be the way to record our progress of audiobooks..?

Also can I do something myself to change it if this issue comes up again? I hate to bug people to fix it... I wish pages weren't the default way of recording our progress...

Thanks for all your help!

You should be able to toggle it, Katalin. Where you enter the update value, the word 'page' should appear in green. If you click on it, it will toggle to %.
The convention with page numbers for an audiobook file is to enter the number of hours, rounded up. I find it helpful when considering what audiobook I want to listen to next, but never use it for tracking my progress.

Oh thanks!
I kind of like to keep track of my progress, and I can estimate the percentage, but using the hours listened to as page numbers... hmmm that's not very good. lol

Thanks again!

When I'm tracking my progress of an audiobook on Goodreads, I toggle the tracker to %, and then write the percentage I've listened to, out of the total duration.

Guide:
First you have to convert the durations (listened duration, and total duration) into minutes.
e.g. 2 hours and 5 minutes = 125 minutes

Formula:
(listened duration / total duration) * 100 = % listened, of total duration

Then you take this "specific percentage", and put it into the progress tracker on Goodreads.


As an alternative: Many media players does also automatically provide you with the percentage information, which you then just put directly into the progress tracker.

Well, I am not worried about that much of accuracy...I estimate the percentage...

I guess-tamate the percentage on audiobooks. I use the percentage on the bottom of the page for my Kindle and, if I read a paper book, I'd go page number.

I like accuracy, not to worried about precision.

Darkpool wrote: "The convention with page numbers for an audiobook file is to enter the number of hours, rounded up..."

Oh, so that's what that is! I could never figure out why audiobooks were shown as having 10 or 17 or whatever pages. Pity librarians can't toggle that over like page/%.

I just go to Amazon or Google Books and find the book, enter a word from near up to the point I have listened to and get the page number this way. Always works. I can even find a quotation this way and share it here.

Tracey wrote: "Oh, so that's what that is! I could never figure out why audiobooks were shown as having 10 or 17 or whatever pages. Pity librarians can't toggle that over like page/%."

The librarians decided to go with hours for audiobooks since not all audiobooks come on CD, you know? They ALL have a length though. And I TOTALLY agree that would be nice if we could have it say "hours" instead of "pages", so people would know to stop putting the number of CDs in..... :)

I am a librarian, and had no knowledge of this decision to go with hours until you mentioned it just now. I've been adding discs for CD editions, and leaving "pages" blank for others.

Me too. And I've cleared the page numbers on a couple because it made no sense to me. I'll have to go back and try to reverse those changes.

Yep, I did the same thing initially until I stumbled over the instructions to do otherwise. These things aren't always easy to find out about! I've taken to adding the info about # disks and running time at the end of the book description when I add an audio CD to the database.

Darkpool wrote: "I've taken to adding the info about # disks and running time at the end of the book description when I add an audio CD to the database...."

That's what I do. I think it makes much more sense than having the running time show up as the page count.

Darkpool wrote: "I've taken to adding the info about # disks and running time at the end of the book description when I add an audio CD to the database."

I do this too.

Yes, hours is definitely the convention. It's in the librarian's manual. Whole hours only and the convention is to round up (rather than the typical mathematical convention to round down if under the half and round up if over). Though I think one should use good judgement regarding the last: If a book is 10 hours and 5 minutes, I put 10, rather than rounding up to 11.

I think they kinda decided that you should round down for 15 mins or less, and round up otherwise. (12:13 --> 12 hours; 12:23 --> 13 hours)

Sara ♥ wrote: "I think they kinda decided that you should round down for 15 mins or less, and round up otherwise. (12:13 --> 12 hours; 12:23 --> 13 hours)"

That makes more sense than just rounding up.

%=portion/total. For an audiobook, divide your current location (number of hours) by the total length of book, and you've got your percentage. This is easy with an iPhone (it tells you how long each book is and how much time is left in a given section of the book). For CDs, i'd just divide the CD you're on by the total number (CD 3 of a 15 CD book would mean you've read 20%)

The problem for me is that I like to keep track of how many pages I've actually read recently, whether through audio or paper (I know, that's the nerdiest thing ever, but doing the book challenge, some of the books I read are really long and some are fairly short, so pages matters more to me than actual book count). My way around this is to get an audiobook but get the paper copy from the library as well, so I can visually track my progress and get my page count that way. I like to visually see how far I am through a book. Always excites me to see I'm halfway through or almost done! :)

Alana wrote: "The problem for me is that I like to keep track of how many pages I've actually read recently, whether through audio or paper (I know, that's the nerdiest thing ever, but doing the book challenge, ..."

I too track pages...I could read 1,000 books in a year if they are all Dr. Seuss or of that variety. So the book counts mean nothing to me. I think the pages are a better representation of my accomplishments.

I've been keeping track of pages and minutes read. I spend a LOT of time with earbuds in!