Poking around the Nokia BetaLabs site recently, I learned about Nokia Audiobooks, which is pretty much just what you’d expect: Recorded books that you can listen to on your Nokia S60 phone.

The description points out that MP3 compression isn’t really suited for voice, and that using the AMR-WB codec* makes for way smaller files — 5 to 10 times smaller — that still have “excellent speech quality.”

So you take any audiobook, convert it to the speech-optimal format with Nokia’s free Audiobook Manager software, and listen to it with Nokia’s Audiobook Player on the S60.

Why bother? Well, why waste space? “A typical 400 page novel translates into 10-20 hour long audiobook, which would traditionally take more than dozen CDs or hundreds of megabytes of low-quality MP3 files.” Transfer times are faster and storage needs lower.

Maybe MP3 players will become MP3/AMR-WB players, handling this new format for on-the-go listening. But, honestly, I’d rather listen to an audiobook on my internet tablet than my phone.

Me, I don’t like headphones or earbuds, so I really like the NIT’s speakers. I wonder, Why doesn’t Nokia port the Audiobook Player to the tablet? Or adapt the built-in media player to handle AMR-WB?

It makes a lot of sense to me. And, well, that’s what I’d like to hear.

ADDED LATER:

Altruist** that he is, qwerty12 (aka fahim) has added the AMR codecs to mplayer. See this thread. Well, there are some hitches (can’t see your amr files in gmplayer to launch them). I’m actually listening to a podcast of Cory Doctorow reading the first installment of True Noise, which I converted from an 18.3 MB mp3 file. The amr file is but 6.7 MB.

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* “AMR-WB codec: Nokia Audiobooks uses standardized Adaptive Multi Rate-WideBand speech encoder (3GPP 26.190 / ITU-T G.722.2 See www.3GPP.org / www.itu.ch) for audio data compression in order to keep memory requirement for a book very small while maintaining excellent speech quality.”

** Doesn’t listen to audiobooks himself but added the codec just because we asked so plaintively!