Yes we all know that you can get lots of audio books legally from sites like iTunes and Audible.com, but it can be expensive and dealing with DRM can be a real problem if you use Linux or other equally awesome operating systems. Until there is a way for Linux users to download audio books, there is only one good way to get them, and so I feel no guilt (maybe a little) about posting a quick how-to for all those who enjoy curling up an listening to a good audio book on their iPod.
The key to getting audio books painlessly is to use one of the oldest Internet traditions, the newsgroup. Long ago news groups were really cool, and many of the great Internet sites got their starts their (including cool sites like imdb.com). Now-a-days they are plagued by huge amounts of crap and Spam, some of which is very, very work “unsafe”. But as news groups have become a thing of the past many use them to anonymously post all sorts of good stuff, from video games to full length moves. The best thing in my opinion is the audio books, which have a very lively community of posters. Here is what you need to start bookin’ it…

To start with you need a news server, these are generally provided by your ISP, and are a local cache that your ISP maintains with copies of posts that people have sent throughout the Internet. These servers will only work if you have one of the IP addresses that the ISP maintains, so you can only use the server that your ISP provides for you. The good thing is that all the ISPs I have ever been a patron of have provided this services, so it seems to just be a standard thing. The bad thing is they really don’t advertise it, you may have to crawl around your ISP’s crappy web site for a while to find the name of this server, or try to guess what it might be (for example my ISP’s POP3 server is “pop-server”, and the IMAP server is “imap-server” so I guessed that the news server might be called news-server, and I was right). A good guess would be “news” or something equally obvious.
Once you have found it, and you have your ISP provided user name and password you are ready to get some software!
I sugest you use Pan it is a piece of linux software that has been ported to many operating systems including windows. To run it on windows you will need to install the GNOME tool kit which is provided by the windows download site. (The last time I installed it it had a crappy interaction with the windows version of gimp, so if you have GIMP installed already you may be able to skip installing GNOME). Once you have this installed you can run it and fill you your servername, username and password, and see if it connects and gets the list of news groups. If it doesn’t work, there is something wrong… I don’t know what it is but it you use the power of google you are sure to find someone with the same problem, and maybe even a solution.
Once you have your news reader set up and all the names of the news groups downloaded you can type “audiobooks” into the find text box on the tool bar, this should list out audio book holding news groups… you can click on on of the newsgroups and start pursuing the selection. News groups are inherently error prone and messages can be lost or garbled by the news servers, and to make matters worse there is a limit to the size of a message with is much smaller then any mp3 file. To get around this problem messages on news groups are encoded in ASCII in the yEnc format. Pan natively understands this format and does its best to put the files together and turn them into binary files. To save these binary files select a swath of files (all the files in a given audio book) and right click and select “Save Attachments As…”. This will start downloading the files, often at the maximum speed of your Internet connection, so it doesn’t take long to get a complete book. You may notice some of the files are marked green and others are marked red. Red files are bad, they are missing pieces and will sound garbled when you play them back, this would be a really big problem, except there is a way to correct these files, but to do that you will need another program….
Par2 is a cheesy check sum scheme that will allow you to correct damaged files. Get QuickPar for windows and par2archive on linux and you will have the tools you need to put everything back together. You will notice that the audio books have 30 to 100+ files that end in the mp3 extension, and then several others that end in par or par2. These additional files contain check sums that will allow Quickpar to set things right. After installing Quickpar go to /Documents and Settings/your-user-name/News/Pan, and once the downloads are complete double click on the first par file, it will open up a simple interface that will look though all the files in the directory and determine if the files can be fixed, if they can a “Repair” button will highlight, click it and wait a while, it should fix the mp3s right up. Consult the man page for par2archive on Linux, it requires using the command line, but works just as well. Once the files are corrected you can get rid of the par files and open the mp3 files in your favorite mp3 player and enjoy.
The one caveat is that not all audio books will have enough data to be repaired, so you might want to just download books where all or most of the files are green, until you get a feel for how many files can be damaged, and still work, also usually if you are missing a a few files, you might only be missing a few minutes, and you can either post a request for those files to be “filled” on the news group or you can live with out it… One other caveat is that you are at the whim of the posters, and you don’t get to download any book you want, but a small selection of what has been posted recently, so if you want something in particular you may have to wait, or request it and wait. (If you wanted to not be a leach you could post your own and build rapport, and maybe someone would fill your request faster then they would have otherwise)…
Happy Downloads…