Can anybody tell me what bitrate I should use for audio books, is there a set standard. I am using EAC with LAME for my music at

-V 4 --vbr-new = --preset fast medium 165 145…185

These sound very good in my shell likes, I have a few Audio Book CD's and I can get more from my local library, I just don't know what setting I should use.

There isn’t a “should” but you could have a goal. Mine is “clear,” “easy to listen to,” and “small.” The result is very difficult to distinguish from the original on the listening equipment I use for such entertainment. I’ve been able to store close to 50 hours on one CD-R. It should be very easy for you to encode a small sample at several settings and compare.
-V 8 --vbr-new --resample 22 --lowpass 11

I find the following setting quite acceptable for most audio book CDs:

-V 7 --vbr-new --strictly-enforce-ISO

It depends on what type of audiobook you are encoding and, as mentioned above, what your goals are. As is stated in the wiki, if you're encoding LAME at low bitrates, you're better off using ABR than VBR. I would use:

--abr 64 -mm

I believe there is still a --preset voice command as well, but last I checked, it maps to --abr 56 -mm

Personally, I encode audiobooks that have a lot of orchestration or important music with standard music settings (usually -V 5 --vbr-new) because it's important to me that this music sound good.

Just as a side note, the audible.com format 4 downloads that I have are encoded at 32 kbps mono... (yes I know it's not LAME MP3 and might not be the best example... but I don't think their encoder is really that much more efficient).

Oh yes... I must also add the usual recommendation, which is to try encoding it a few different ways and see what sounds best to your ears.

Thanks for the info guys, now going to put EAC into good use

Do you need to use mp3 for this? I'd rather go for nero aac or vorbis at settings which result in bitrates less than 50 kbps average. Way more effective.

for some reason all the audio book type stuff i have has music in it also so i just encode to -V4 and it turns out a bit smallish