Many users of the Amazon Kindle (My new favorite device) don’t realize how many cool tricks and features it has,

Kindle’s got the “Text to Speech” function to read the books too you, but it’s no where near as good as having Stephen Fry read “The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, so I started looking into the Audiobook features on the Kindle.

Kindle uses “Audible” for it’s audio book playback, it gives you a whole load of features that the standard MP3 player built into the Kindle doesn’t, such as the ability to fastforward, skip, rewind, select tracks and give it lots of Metadata,

So to get your MP3 / CD Audiobooks onto your Kindle, first rip them all into Mp3 format (I use Linux, and Rhytmbox for my music playback), then throw each of the individual MP3s into a folder.

Open up a terminal window and do the following command:

cd “/home/user/nameofthefoldercontainingyourmp3s”

cat * > CD1.mp3Nickinator - Kindle Audiobook

What you did there was change to the directory that contained your mp3s, then the “cat” command (concatenate) joined all of the files in the directory (hence the * wildcard), and merged them into a single file named “CD1.mp3″.

Alas, the metadata still thinks that the track length is only the length of the first track, because it’s just copied all the metadata from the first track, to combat this I’ve just imported the MP3 into Audacity, then exported it again, when you export, you’ll have the option to add the basic Metadata, such as Author, Name etc, which will show up on your Kindle, that said, it will still play normally if you don’t run it though Audacity, it’ll just keep playing after it thinks the track is finished, meaning you won’t know how far though you are.

Now you’ve joined all those individual tracks into one Mp3, it’s time to add some meta data to allow the Kindle to recognize it as a book, I’m using “EasyTag” to do this, but again, it’s just because I’m quite OCD about Tagging.

After this is all done copy it into the “Audiobooks” folder on your Kindle then eject it, your Audio Book will show up allong side your normal books,