Meddling with Metadata

My experience redesigning an audiobook experience.

This project was completed as part of an immersive authoring course (DGM 2260) at Utah Valley University.

Over the last few decades, audiobooks have become increasingly popular for a wider audience than ever before. While audiobooks were initially created to make books accessible to individuals with impaired vision, the ease and enjoyment of them has spread far beyond that narrow market to include commuters, multitaskers, exercise fiends, bedtime listeners and beyond.

Audiobooks are also now readily available on smartphones, tablets, laptops and more. Without the restrictions of a CD player or cassette tape, the experience of enjoying an audiobook is no longer limited to just the audio. The opportunities for a more immersive audiobook experience have expanded largely through the use of metadata.

About now you might be asking, what is metadata? Simply put, metadata is data about the data. In regards to audiobooks, this means including more than simply the name of the author and the audio files. Metadata can take many forms but for this project I focused on cover art, a book description, special readable content for each chapter, and individual chapter art. By including this type of content, listeners have more options to choose their level of engagement with the content, transforming their audiobook experience from “audible” to immersive (pun intended!).

In order to better understand the options and capabilities of an audiobook, I was tasked with redesigning one for myself. Let’s delve in.

Selecting A Novel

For this project I chose to redesign a classic novel, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Not only is this a wonderfully written piece of literature, but one that I felt was riddled with opportunities to create a more immersive experience. Here are a few reasons I chose The Bell Jar:

• There are several meaningful symbols throughout the book that I could implement in a cover redesign,
• Although the book is classified as fiction, it is largely autobiographical- drawing parallels between Sylvia Plath’s life and the life described in The Bell Jar would make for engaging readable content, and
• The Bell Jar has had numerous cover redesigns in its near 60 years in print, which I thought would provide a unique challenge (see previous covers below).

Getting Meta

To get started, I began researching and gathering content that would be useful for the metadata. I started by figuring out just how I wanted the chapters to be displayed on the device on which the audiobook was being heard. The Bell Jar does not have chapter titles- rather, they are all numbered. This simplified my options, but I still had a few to choose from.

For the chapters I chose to stick with numbering them with “Chapter #” because, although simple, it allowed each one to be legible and reduced any confusion from only having the number. I decided, however, to spell out each number on the actual chapter art.

The real legwork for the metadata came when I began researching how I should use the “Description” fields for each chapter. I decided I wanted to help the readers better understand the correlations between the lives of Sylvia Plath (the author) and Esther Greenwood (the main character). I also thought it would be helpful to provide further information on some of the symbolism found in the novel. This part required hours of research. I read several sites that contained information about Sylvia Plath’s life and used Sparknotes to find out more about the symbols of the novel. I also used Sparknotes to follow each chapter and decide where each piece of information would be best placed.

The results were twenty unique pieces of information intended to enhance the reader’s experience and allow them to better understand the context of each event of the novel.

Redesigning The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar has been published with a variety of cover art over the last near 60 years.

Before beginning the redesign, I began gathering content and inspiration. I gathered past covers to see what others had done and found that the past designs were overwhelmingly traditionally feminine, featuring women or silhouettes of women, various shades of pink, or flowers. Some reflected the darker tone of the novel, but I found myself intrigued by the contrast between a feminine cover that reflected the era of the novel and the tragic content of the novel itself.

I created a mood board to reflect some of the ideas I had for the design. I knew I wanted to feature figs and a bell jar on the cover art since those were two major themes of the novel. I found that I was drawn to colors that were representative of the 1950s.

I used Pinterest to create a board of ideas that I could use to inspire my cover art.

Below is my design for the cover art:

I also created a few different covers to use throughout the chapters:

I created a few more cover designs that I used throughout the chapters.

Building the Audiobook

At this point I had gathered all my assets and it was time to build the audiobook. In order to do so I downloaded Audiobook Builder from the App Store. The process itself was fairly straightforward but I did have one issue.

My audiobook files were not organized by chapter. I had considered taking the files into Adobe Audition and stitching them together, but the Audiobook Builder allowed for me to join multiple files together into one “chapter” so I took that approach instead.

My file organization.

At this point I was ready to build the audiobook. I was hopeful it would be smooth sailing from here, but it was not.

I immediately had issues with my cover art. As seen above, the cover art shown was not what I had designed. I discovered that the audio files I downloaded already had images embedded in them that were overriding my designs that I had added in Audiobook Builder. I went through and tried to fix this on Audiobook Builder but finally found that I had to go to the source- the files themselves. I went through and manually deleted the old cover art off of every file and replaced it with the corresponding chapter art.

Once this looked right in iTunes I went through and added the supplemental content (descriptions) to each of the chapters. After that I was ready to begin testing my designs.

Cross-Platform Testing

I tried uploading and playing the audiobook to three different devices: Apple TV, an iPod nano, and a Samsung Galaxy smartphone. I wanted to make sure to get representation from both Apple and Android. I got varying results from each one.

Apple TV

Apple TV had the smoothest transition from iTunes to device.

The Apple TV was my first, easiest, and most successful platform. I airplayed the audiobook from my Macbook Pro to the TV without a hitch. The audiobook began as a player in the corner of the screen and then sized up to fit the whole screen (and the design scaled to size beautifully, thanks to my .PNG export!). It even had some simple screen transitions when changing chapters.

iPod Nano

The book and chapter have the same title on the iPod Nano. Given more time I would have tried a different export technique to see if I could have all the chapters together within a file with the book title.

The iPod Nano was relatively straightforward to use for the audiobook. Everything went fairly smoothly, except when navigating to the audiobook on the iPod, the menu went directly from “Audiobook” to the individual chapters. There was no option to click on “The Bell Jar”, which I believe was most likely due to the way I output the audiobook. Since it was the only audiobook available on the iPod it did not cause a major problem for me, but imagine having five books on the device, all of which have a Chapter 1. There would certainly be problems with that. If I had more time I would troubleshoot this further.

Samsung Galaxy Smartphone

To be able to play the audiobook on a Samsung device I had to download a third-party audiobook player. This one was not visually appealing but got the job done (but perhaps there is a better-designed one out there).

This was by far the most challenging device for transferring the files. It took a bit of digging on the internet to figure out the best approach. After a while I found that it would be best to pull the files out of iTunes and into a separate folder, and then place that folder into the memory of the smartphone. I tried downloading Google Play Books to listen to the audiobook but the .M4B output I used for Audiobook Builder was not compatible with the app. Instead I found another simple audio player that could convert .M4B files to work on the Samsung smartphone. This worked to play the audio files and to show the chapter cover art, but that was the extent of it. None of the other metadata was available.

I would have liked to have more time to troubleshoot this issue, but I think it would have meant taking another approach completely. Perhaps I would have needed to output the files from Audiobook Builder as a different format and added the supplemental content into Google’s version of iTunes, but for the sake of this project I deemed having the audio and the chapter art available sufficient enough.

Conclusion

Metadata can be extremely useful in enhancing a listener’s experience when using an audiobook. It is a more holistic, immersive approach to a traditionally audio-only platform. But translating that across platforms can sometimes be unpredictable. When planning on creating an experience like this, it is important to give yourself the time and resources to test and re-evaluate your process before marking it off as a finished product.