The process involves the follwoing software to handle the decoding. First you will use ‘hymn’ to turn the m4p (protected) file into a m4a that you can play anywhere. Then you will use aya audio converter to convert the m4a into an mp3 file.

• 1. Get hymn. No Link.Sorry for it. We hope you can understand it. Please google it by yourself. To make the instructions as simple as possible download hymn and unzip it to the C:\hymn directory. Hymn is a command line tool for windows that is pretty easy to use.
• 2. Copy the mp4 files you want to convert to C:\hymn (if you understand windows you can just add c:\hymn to your path, if not don’t worry and continue).open a MS dos command prompt window start>>accessories>>command prompt
• 3. Run hymn on each of the files you are converting
  C:/> cd hymn
  C:/> hymn thenameofthefileiwantoconvert.m4p
  You will need to do this for every file you want to convert or put multiple files in the command line
  C:/> hymn filetoconvert1.m4p filetoconvert1.m4p
  The m4a files will be created in the same directory. You can use the hymn command line options if you want to send them to another directory.
• 4.You are now ready to convert the m4a files to mp3 files with aya audio converter

Going on a road trip? Instead of playing A is for Alabama, why not take along an audiobook to liven up the drive?

Many of our patrons regularly stop in for audiobooks because they commute to work. In the summer,however, we can spot those roadtrippers because they come up to the desk with a stack of audiobooks.

Any of the Harry Potter books on CD are popular. Read by actor Jim Dale, they can be enjoyed by the whole family.

Thrillers make for an exciting drive, as long as you don’t listen to “Silence of the Lambs” by Thomas Harris at night by yourself. If you need something a little less scary, you can try David Baldacci or John Grisham.

A romance audiobook can help set the mood for a getaway for two. Try Nora Roberts or Fern Michaels. Just remember you might want to turn the volume down when you stop at the toll booth.

Make it a trip to another world by listening to a sci-fi or fantasy audiobook. Orson Scott Card or J.R.R. Tolkien fits the bill.

Or you can see who solves the mystery first by listening to an Agatha Christie or Anne Perry.

In the middle of nowhere when the radio is pure static, an audiobook can keep the white lines from getting blurry. They can liven up any road trip.

The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
by Leonard Mlodinow (Author)
Average Customer Review:
Release Date: May 13, 2008

Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook: Roleplaying Game Core Rules, 4th Edition
by Wizards RPG Team (Author)
Average Customer Review:
Release Date: June 6, 2008

The Downhill Lie: A Hacker’s Return to a Ruinous Sport
by Carl Hiaasen (Author)
Average Customer Review:
Release Date: May 6, 2008

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel
by David Wroblewski (Author)
Average Customer Review:
Release Date: June 10, 2008

The Monster of Florence
by Douglas Preston (Author), Mario Spezi (Contributor)
Average Customer Review:
Release Date: June 10, 2008

The Essential Laws of Fearless Living: Find the Power to Never Feel Powerless Again
by Guy Finley (Author), Ellen Dickstein (Foreword)
Average Customer Review:
Publication Date: June 1, 2008

LibriVox volunteers bring you 16 different recordings of Armistice by Sophie Jewett. This was the weekly poetry project for the week of June 1st, 2008.

• Bartleby e-text
• LibriVox’s Armistice Internet Archive page
• Zip file of the entire book (8.7MB)

The Old Wives’ Tale is a novel by Arnold Bennett, first published in 1908. It deals with the lives of two very different sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, following their stories from their youth, working in their mother’s draper’s shop, into old age. It is generally regarded as one of Bennett’s finest works. It covers a period of about 70 years from roughly 1840 to 1905, and is set in Burslem and Paris. (Summary by Andy)

• Gutenberg e-text
• Wikipedia - Arnold Bennett
• Wikipedia - The Old Wives’ Tale
• LibriVox’s The Old Wives’ Tale Internet Archive page
• Zip file of the entire book (671 MB)

LibriVox volunteers bring you 9 different recordings of The Siege of Belgrade by Alaric Alexander Watts. This was the weekly poetry project for the week of May 25th, 2008.

• E-text
• Wikipedia - Alaric Alexander Watts
• LibriVox’s The Siege of Belgrade Internet Archive page
• Zip file of the entire book (8.9MB)

Quick fyi for BoingBoing readers :. Cory Doctorow has just released comic adaptations of his award-winning science fiction stories - Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now. You can download them here for free, or buy the collection on Amazon.

Related Content:

Download free copy of Shake Girl

17 Free and Downloadable Graphic Novels

Lifehacker is running a good piece today that highlights a series of web-based language tools for anyone looking to figure out a word’s definition, translation, pronunciation, synonym, or antonym. Word nerds, this could be your lucky day:

Chief Inspector Strock gets the tough cases. When a volcano suddenly appears to threaten mountain towns of North Carolina amid the non-volcanic Blue Ridge Mountains, Strock is posted to determine the danger. When an automobile race in Wisconsin is interrupted by the unexpected appearance of a vehicle traveling at multiples of the top speed of the entrants, Strock is consulted. When an odd-shaped boat is sighted moving at impossible speeds off the New England coast, Stock and his boss begin to wonder if the incidents are related. And when Strock gets a hand-lettered note warning him to abandon his investigation, on pain of death, he is intrigued rather than deterred.

Set in a period when gasoline engines were in their infancy and automobiles were rare, and when even Chief Inspectors had to engage a carriage and horses to move about, the appearance of a vehicle that can move at astounding speeds on land, on water - and as later revealed, underwater and through the air - marks a technological advance far beyond the reach of nations. It is technology invented by and for the sole benefit of a man who styles himself (with some justification) ‘The Master of the World.’

My Review

This book is apparently a sequel, I only found that out after having listened to it and I can assure you that it is entirely self contained and you do not have to read/listened to the prequel.

As the blurb suggests we have an investigation within the story, the lead character is trying to find the cause of various strange events. We follow the lead characters through his failures and successes.

This story by Jules Verne is not so much an adventure as a slow paced investigation into the unusual by a ploding investigator. There are one or two very brief moments of a speedier pace but thats all.

All in all, it was a pleasant enough story but the plot was extremly thin.

The reading is by Mark Smith, one of the excellent readers and Librivox.

Reading 3/3
Production 2/3
Story 1/3

Total Score 6/9

The Quarterly Conversation, the online critical journal edited by Scott Esposito, has just published its twelfth issue. If I have the math right (and assuming it’s not like some literary publications which are less periodicals than “sporadicals”) that means TQC has been around for three years. A long time, as these things go. And if it were a print publication, I would definitely buy it at the newsstand. The table of contents lists essay and reviews on Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Bolaño, Nicholson Baker, Simone de Beauvoir, and Kurt Vonnegut, as well as several authors whose names I don’t recognize yet probably should.

And it’s good to find Dan Green using the publication of Flying to America as an occasion to discuss the truly screwed-up way that readers must now encounter Donald Barthelme’s fiction. Green translates into a rational argument what I was afraid might be my own, private, very irritable response to Sixty Stories and Forty Stories.

The original collections, most of them published in the 1970s, each had a special flow and temper. To quote Green:

Rarely does Barthelme stick to a previously employed method or device (with the possible exception of the “dialog” stories-stories written entirely in dialog-that Barthelme wrote throughout his career but especially in the mid-to-late ’70s). One of the pleasures of reading Barthelmes’ stories as they appeared, both in The New Yorker and in the subsequent books, was anticipating what new challenge to our assumptions about the nature of the short story Barthelme would offer. Many of these stories were indeed among the most innovative works of fiction in a period marked by a renewal of innovation by American fiction writers, but inevitably Barthelme’s insistent experimentalism would provide hits and misses, failed experiments as well as transformative triumphs.

Even though the same work could be found in the Big Barthelme Barns, it wasn’t the same. The sense of an evolving body of writing seemed to be obliterated. After that, I kept an eye out for the paperbacks of the original collections at secondhand shops. The fact that Come Back, Dr. Caligari or Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts have not been reprinted in years — by now, decades — is absurd.

“I fear,” writes Green, “given the economics of American publishing, that the original books will not be readily available and that Barthelme will be known to future readers mostly through the assembled miscellanies-perhaps only by Sixty Stories. This will be a sad (and avoidable) injustice to a great writer.”

Damn straight. So is somebody out there willing to fix it?

I’ve been finding Julia Hartwig’s “In Praise of the Unfinished,” translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter (Knopf), a metabolism-altering volume. Austerely intelligent questioning, the acute and subtle notation of both outer landscape and the psyche’s interior inventions, and a bracingly clear-eyed compassion mark these poems by a writer long preeminent in Poland but until now virtually unknown in the US. This book joins the section of the bookcase where Milosz, Szymborska, Herbert, Swir, Rozewicz, and Zagajewski (author of another extraordinary new book this season, “Eternal Enemies“) already live–for me, one of the great, illuminating constellations of world literature.–Jane Hirshfield

Optimal Thinking : 9 Optimal days towards permanent results is an audio book written by Rosalene Glickman.

The successor to positive thinking, Optimal Thinking is the mental tool you need to achieve your ultimate life. This revolutionary, life-optimizing audio program shows you just how simple it is to sweep past the ordinary and even the extraordinary into the world of the highest and best. You will never settle for second best again!

• Ask the best questions and find the best solutions
• Make the most constructive decisions in every situation
• Maximize your enjoyment of everyday activities
• Handle negative situations and interactions most effectively
• Experience the full power of your mind
• Function at your peak in business and personal relationships
• Bring out the best in others, and much more!