The various digital audio book formats available is bound to get confusing as more people move to buying audio books from the web. What audio book fans buy one day may not work on equipment they buy another day. Here’s a brief guide to the most important formats.

MP3

This standard of digitally compressed music is the most pervasive and the most used, for the moment. Can be played back on any player in the market. The only problem with MP3s is the lack of copyright protection. You may not care, but the music industry sure does. Some music download services offer MP3 downloads, others are going to the WMA and AAC formats.

AAC

This codec was developed by Dolby Labs and is currently only being used by Apple. iTunes defaults to encoding in AAC and the Apple online music store downloads are all pre-encoded as AAC files. AAC sounds better than MP3 and takes up less space on a hard drive (potentially), but only the iPod is able to play it back. That can limit your options.

WMA

The long name for it is Windows Media Audio. Like AAC, WMA sounds better and takes up less space than MP3. It is the default encoding standard for Windows Media, which is built in to every Windows PC. Many companies are now supporting WMA on their players and music download sites are starting to offer titles in the WMA format.

ATRAC3

Right now, only Sony uses this format and only Sony players can play it back. "ATRAC3plus" is the next generation audio compression technology based on "ATRAC". While "ATRAC3" was able to compress a CD to approximately 1/10 of the original size, "ATRAC3plus" is able to compress with higher quality at approximately 1/20 of the size. Audio books currently are not available in this format, but music is available, and all Sony MP3 players support this format.

Ogg Vorbis

Ogg Vorbis is a new audio compression format. It is roughly comparable to other formats used to store and play digital music, such as MP3, VQF, AAC, and other digital audio formats. It is different from these other formats because it is completely free, open, and unpatented.

Brilliance Audio, one of our main publishers, provides MP3-CD audio book recordings formatted in the new Consumer Electronic Association/ Audiobook Publishers Association Audiobook Standards for MP3 formatting. The formatting standards provide listeners with these important features:

* Full Navigation by Book, Chapter, or Page!

* ID3 v2.3 tagging - displays information in MP3 Players

* DAISY 2.02 standards for Digital Talking Books

* MultiAudio Table of Contents file with NEW Audiobook Extension set

* Full Playlist and ASCII naming conventions for proper playback on low memory devices and backward compatibility

The DAISY format for digital talking books

DAISY is the new digital talking book standard, developed by an international consortium of libraries that serve people who are blind or have print-related disabilities. The DAISY standard was developed in order to enable a person who is blind or print disabled to access the information in a book with the same ease with which a sighted person accesses information in a print book. The usability of a DAISY digital book should be compared that of a cassette tape, the format in which most accessible books are currently available. As audio tapes will become obsolete in the future, the DAISY format was developed for the new world of digital talking books delivered on CD, DVD, or over the Internet.

The DAISY format is a file format standard for digital (electronic) books. In the same way that the HTML files that make up web pages or the ASCII of text format files are based on a standard, DAISY is just that, a standard format.