Dear Mrs. Bird Audiobook
The Book
When I was in 4th grade, I had an incredible opportunity to hear from a Jewish gentleman and Holocaust survivor from Poland. He was old and spoke through an interpreter. He came to our school and told us the story of how he’d survived by escaping a concentration camp. Somehow he’d managed to climb into a sewage truck where he stayed for several hours until he was able to eventually climb out and find help. I was moved by his life story and have ever since been fascinated by stories and history of the Holocaust and World War II.
Mrs. Dear Bird is a light historical fiction book I picked for this first assignment partly because it takes place in London during the Second World War. It tells the story of Emmy, a young woman trying to do her part during the war, and her best friend Bunty. A few chapters into the book, I realized the story was really about friendship, and had little to do with the War — only used as a setting. I still enjoyed the book immensely.
Metadata
In the book, each chapter has a title (as shown in outline 3 below) so I chose to include them instead of chapter numbers in order to avoid redundancies once the audiobook is open in itunes. It looks cleaner that way.
I tried to add the narrator’s name in itunes, but it displayed it more prominently than the author’s name, so I got rid of it. I don’t think the narrator’s name deserves more visibility than the author’s.
Other pieces of metadata I added:
- Release date
- A short description
- Comment on both part 1 and part 2 about women’s role in World War II
There wasn’t a whole lot of room for a lot of metadata, but I’ve included a good amount that’s interesting to the prospect reader.
Audiobook Builder
I downloaded my book audio files from Downpour.com. From there, creating the audiobook in Audiobook Builder was pretty straightforward as the app is simple and easy to use. The audiobook is about 10 hours long, so it’s split into 2 parts.
Cover Art
The original cover art is yellow with a drawing of a young woman. In the book, Emmy works for a women magazine as a typewriter where she types up answers to readers who write to their help column. So, I wanted to incorporate a vintage typewriter on the cover.
I started looking for a high-resolution picture of a vintage typewriter that I could work with. I also wanted to find an equally vintage patterned background or wallpaper. And I’d need to crop the picture to the size of 3000px x 3000px to fit.
The right picture would also have a blank page in the typewriter for the book title.
I came across a couple of viable options:
Option A has a lot going for it and it was a strong candidate for the cover art. The typewriter is beautiful, and it’s set on warm wood table or floor. The yellow and green tones are lovely and evokes feelings of nostalgia—just what I was looking for.
Option B above is cute but the pink polka dot background and light colored wood floor feels wrong, so that picture was quickly discarded.
Option C is what I ultimately ended up choosing because it has everything I was looking for. The wallpaper is lovely and something I can picture finding in someone’s house or office way back in that time period. There’s a blank piece of paper in the typewriter but it wasn’t crispy white—more like what I was looking for. At first though, I was concerned that it wouldn’t crop well into a square, but ended up being just perfect.
Above is a picture of the final cover art. I used a google font called Special Elite for the text. Book title went on the blank page in the typewriter, and author’s book went up on top. I tried simply adding AJ Pearce’s name, but against the busy background, it wasn’t very visible. So, I placed a ribbon underneath it, and it was much better. I matched the golden ribbon to a similar color in the background, and the red drop shadow to red details on the typewriter for consistency.
Testing
I tested it on my iPhone, a Samsung Note 8 and my car touch screen.
On my iPhone, I was able to open it on iBooks, and check the metadata and cover art image quality. In my car, I was able to connect my iPhone to it.
I’m happy to report both the cover art pictures and the metadata look great.
I was able to see both cover art and chapter cover art on my iPhone and car, as well as chapter titles, and chapter length. My description and comments I added on iTunes are nowhere to be seen.
On the Samsung Note 8, I had to download an app called Smart AudioBook Player in order to open the files. It doesn’t look as nice as it does on iBooks but it looks decent, and it gets the job done. I was able to see the cover art and some of the metadata, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to see any of the chapter art anywhere, nor the description and comments.
Through this assignment I learned a lot about metadata and testing on different devices. I realize space comes at a premium on small devices and users don’t always get to see all of the metadata that is there.
