My daughter (19) works at a warehouse job and listens to a lot of audiobooks.
I’d like to gift her a subscription to a service, but I don’t know much about the options. She had audible for a while. I just use Libby.
What audio book services do you recommend?
I really enjoyed Libro.fm, it works the same as Audible but you can either use their app or download the book files, and I think they’re DRM free.
Also it’s really cool because you get to choose a local book store to support and I think they share a part of what you spend with them.
I’m know I’m going to get downvoted for this, and a witch will put her curse on me, but here it goes.
I actually like audible. The subscription runs me somewhere around $12-13 per month, and includes one credit that can be used for any book. You can also buy extra credits for about the same price, and you can give audiobooks as gifts. My partner also has a subscription and I’ll frequently steal unused credits. I used to try to game the system and get the longest or most expensive audiobooks I could find with my credits. It was fun to get a 40 hour long $45 audiobook for $12. Now that I have an audible library that’s starting to rival my Steam library in terms of unplayed content, I’ll just grab whatever has caught my eye and pay cash for anything under $12. They have a lot of sales. They also have free content, but it rotates and sometimes they’ll pull the free books after a while.
Being Amazon, it’s pretty platform universal. Their apps are pretty much everywhere, like with kindle. They also have a very large library with a number of books labeled as exclusive to audible. These include full cast productions, which can be really fun.
All of that gushing aside, their software is fucking horrid. Every few months they’ll do an update that breaks something. It doesn’t make the app unusable, but it’ll change the invisible hit box size for the buttons or screw up the logic somehow. I currently have negative 56 minutes in the book I’m listening to, and although I can go back and forth using the +- 60s buttons, the scrubber/progress bar isn’t working. I suspect they have major QA issues at Amazon, like a lot of the big companies do.
Anyway, between the ubiquity, the prices, the free content, and almost seamlessness of the experience, that’s the service I use. I listen to audiobooks every night while falling asleep as well as when I’m working around the house or whatever. I listen to the point of having two pairs of AirPods so I can swap them when the batteries die after 4 hours. Plus, depending on the book, the kindle edition and the audible edition can stay in sync. Sometimes that’s helpful, sometimes very much not.
I know there’s more open source options out there. I had to do that to get Cory Doctorow’s new book since he refuses to publish via Amazon, but it was a much bigger pain in the ass than I’d prefer. At this point in my life I really want something that just (mostly) works and requires zero attention. I’m mid to late stage career in science/tech and I want to dedicate exactly zero brain cycles to listening to an audiobook. Audible does that. Plus, like I said, they have Amazon money so they have a number of exclusives and freebies and sales.
I might have recommendations as far as books go if I knew your or your daughter’s tastes in literature, but as far as the base app, I’m sticking with audible.
It’s very sweet of you to do so.
If she has not already I’d see if she has a local library onlinedigital library card
Overdrive/Libby give access to a huge number of free books via the library.
Otherwise I would suggest audible just for the ubiquity of it and it’s large library.
Also of note, if you happen to live in NY state, you can get a NYPL membership free. You just have to prove residency and you can join online.
I use Downpour. They all kind of have the same pricing service. $12ish for a monthly one credit, buy more at the same price. Downpour lets you either use their app for syncing or just download the MP3 and/or M4B (a format similar to MP3 but with chapter stops for books) to use however you’d like.
Though I’m not sure it supports gifting. Someone else suggested Libro.FM which is very similar but I know does have gifting.
I avoid Audible personally, they’ve historically taken a huge cut from authors. I can get basically the same deal everywhere else. If you’re curious check out Brandon Sanderson’s various posts or media releases about the topic.
A podcast app that supports RSS would also be a good idea.
I’ve had an Audible subscription for a long time, but you don’t really own the content. I found a way to download and unlock the content and as soon as I’ve used up all my credits, I’ll cancel it.
Spotify has an audiobook program, but there was mention a few days ago that they have changed their terms and conditions to mess with the content rights of authors. They also have this strange metering system where as part of the service you get so many hours of listening and then have to purchase additional credits to finish the book, or wait until next billing cycle.
Libby and Hoopla are both tied to public libraries and are free, but you have to put holds on popular audiobooks and wait.
Another interesting service is Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/plus. They have an all-you-can eat plan for audiobooks as well as ebooks+audiobooks. I haven’t used them, but will after I cancel Audible.
There are services like https://audie.ai/ that use AI to turn textbooks into audiobooks. There are a lot of them out there. Most are targeted at authors or publishers, but there are also projects to convert Project Guttenberg books into audiobooks: https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/ai-generates-thousands-free-audiobooks
You could try Scribid
https://www.scribd.com/slideshare
2 months free trial. I used it a while back. Signed up for trial the immediately cancelled. I primarily use audible these days.
Has anyone tried Everand? https://www.everand.com/
