Ripping Audio Books On CD To MP3

Lots of people who listen to Podcasts may be interested in audio books as well.  The most popular format to purchase/rent/borrow audio books is on CD.  But, the CD player is a dying piece of hardware, so one might want to convert these CDs to MP3 files.  Unfortunately, normal MP3 conversion software will make it hard because it expects each track to be a different song on an album.  Additionally, most audio books appear to lack CDDB information, so you may have trouble tagging your audio files.  A more preferrable format would be to take each disk of the book into it's own ~70 minute audio file, just like a podcast.  Here's how to do it using Ubuntu:

First, install abcde:

sudo apt-get install abcde lame

Next, use the following command to rip the CD.

mkdir ./temp; cd temp; abcde -1xo mp3 -d /dev/scd0 ;find $1 -name *.mp3| while read FILE; do mv "$FILE" ../bookname01.mp3 ;done;cd ..

Here's a little cheat sheet from abcde's ripper output:
http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/manual.html

OUTPUT SMILIES
:-) Normal operation, low/no jitter
:-| Normal operation, considerable jitter
:-/ Read drift
:-P Unreported loss of streaming in atomic read operation
8-| Finding read problems at same point during reread; hard to
cor-rect
:-0 SCSI/ATAPI transport error
:-( Scratch detected
;-( Gave up trying to perform a correction
8-X Aborted read due to known, uncorrectable error
:^D Finished extracting

PROGRESS BAR SYMBOLS
- Jitter correction required
+ Unreported loss of streaming/other error in read
! Errors found after stage 1 correction; the drive is making
the same error through multiple re-reads, and cdparanoia is having
trouble detecting them.
e SCSI/ATAPI transport error (corrected)
V Uncorrected error/skip

Finally, if you want to update the ID3 tags for all of your ripped files, use tagtool to mass ID3 tag the folder of MP3s