I recently ordered and received several audio books from Amazon.com. I already had several which include J. K. Rowling‘s Harry Potter books:

  1. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
  2. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
  3. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
  4. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
  5. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

In addition to this I have several others as well as several Old Time Radio (OTR) shows which are incredibly cool to listen to.

To this collection I have recently added the 6th Harry Potter book: Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince. I also have all the above HP books in hard cover. Call me crazy, but I like them a lot. Jim Dale does a very good job of narration and has a different voice for each characer – amazing.

The latest shipment that arrived today from Amazon includes the following C. S. Lewis books:

  • The Problem of Pain
  • Mere Christianity
  • The Screwtape Letters
  • The Great Divorce
  • The Chronicles of Narnia:
    1. The Machician’s Nephew
    2. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
    3. The Hourse and His Boy
    4. Price Caspian
    5. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
    6. The Silver Chair
    7. The Last Battle

Arriving in a few days will be the next two to add to the collection: A Christmas Carol (narrated by Jim Dale) and Around the World in 80 Days (also narrated by Jim Dale).

I am encoding these fine books into mp3s using Grip and LAME as the encoder. Then fixing up the tags using EasyTAG – a GTK+ program which makes fixing tags easy as pie. I encode them using LAME’s -h or “high quality” flag at 56kbps in mono. They sound great and don’t take up too much room. I could do them at 32kbps but I like them at 56 which sound a little bit better than the 32 and since it’s only voice, I have no problem with the sound quality of the encoded versions.