Poll

Number of discs, and number of pages in the print versions.

Hours or percentage

Since I get most of my audio books from The National Library Service for the Blind, I like hours.

Hours:Minutes

Chapters is problematic, because some books don't have chapters.

I don't see why this is so difficult but this battle has been raging for quite some time.

I like to use the stats feature to show how many pages I've read in a year. So anything other than the number of pages screws up my count. Here is an example of how I handle audiobooks, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. It shows both then length of the book for those interested and keeps the number of pages for those who like to track that enabling the built-in Goodreads functionality. Number of hours/minutes standardizes the number of CDs and/or chapters and solves the digital downloads issue from Audible which does not have a CD count. Inevitably, however, someone changes my entry to something less useful and instead of fighting it by changing it back and forth, I change my edition from audiobook to hardcover because the pages are most important to me.

I would say hours. That is how they are posted on each audiobook. I don't see disc or chapters being possible as I have seen digital downloads in 1 file or 10 files for same book. In Fact, audible asked your preference to download 1 file or many.

Also, for progress you should do "time remaining" as audible, itunes players show the time remaining and NOT the time played. This is opposite of book pages progess.

Shane I agree, hours and minutes plus time remaining in the same. I list all of my books as print here on GR for the pages. Like Grumpus mentioned, something often changes with the way audiobooks are listed in the database and a twenty hour audio ends up counting as reading just one page. It's easier to never select the audio format edition.

I don't understand why we believe page count to be a meaningful statistic in any case. Authors speak of productivity in terms of word count per day. Stephen King says in On Writing that he produces 2,000 words each morning. To me that sounds pretty typical of working authors. Speed readers speak in terms of words per unit of time too. In their case, as with typists, they're concerned with words per minute. But then, if anyone were to measure their reading speed, they'd be using the same terms. When talking about productivity, no one in their right mind would bother with pages. They're too rough a unit of measure. Print layout and page size can change the page count of a printed book by significant amounts.

I can't imagine how chapter count could be seen as a meaningful number. The accepted standard is between 3,000 and 6,000 words. Chapters get us further from the actual question we should be asking: how many words? There are no hard and fast rules with the chapter. The idea of the chapter is to provide stopping points. It is meant to divide a book into portions that can be read within one sitting, but what is a 'sitting'? People are all different. Authors are different too. The fact that the craft of writing is a creative one can muck up any hard and fast rules. A chapter can be any length. It's entirely up to the author, and what they can slide past their publisher. I've seen 2 word chapters in professionally published works. I've also seen authors rattle on in excess of 20,000 words in a single chapter.

And number of discs? Okay, the standard CDA audio format yields 60, 70 or 80 minutes per disc depending on compression and disc size, so I suppose that is of some use. But that rule of thumb goes right out the window when we start talking about MP3 CD, or heaven forbid, the Audible standard: AAX file format downloaded as whole units, no CD included. Again, we slide further away from a meaningful number.

The one thing we all can agree on is that if the book is read aloud, page count becomes a mostly meaningless statistic. Though, as a dumbed down rule of thumb, I've found that 100,000 words produces a page count of around 300, and an audiobook of around 10 hours. If the author conforms to the 3,000 - 6,000 word limit on chapter length, the number of chapters should be between 16 and 33. The average reader, reading aloud, should be able to go through 10,000 words in an hour, or roughly 1.6 to 3.3 chapters. This formula is obviously far from perfect, but it gives a ballpark idea.

I prefer to use percentage. As that's easily found out in the Audible app.