This is a great idea. The boffins down at the Nokia research centre have just bashed out a very nice sounding piece of beta software indeed called Nokia Audiobooks.
The application is essentially a compression tool optimized for voice, dubbed AMR-WB. The package includes the Nokia Audiobook Manager for compressing the audio on your PC and the Nokia Audiobook Player for listening to the audio books on your handset.
Seeing as a typical audio book is between 10 and 20 hours long, the size of the audio file after it has been compressed into MP3 format is still prohibitively large for most handsets. The AMR-WB codec crushes voice audio down about 5 to 10 times more than MP3 does, thus making audio books a real possibility.
This could be a really interesting distribution avenue for books publishers as well as a breath of fresh air for mobile users in the content stakes. The beta is available for free as always from the Nokia Beta Labs.
(Via Tommi’s S60 Applications Blog)
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