The public library is shut down for physical audiobooks. I have the libby app where I can get digital audiobooks for free, which is nice, but they don’t always have the ones I want.
Audible sounds nice, but its $15 a month which is kind of pricey for a service where I just want a few books that I can’t get for free at the library.
Are there ways to get audible cheaper, or alternatives to audible that people like with a good selection? Supposedly audible had deals on prime day for $5/month, but I missed that one.
Is there a site where you can enter the name of a book, and it tells you how much it costs for the hardcover or audiobook version from various websites and services
When you say “libby app,” you mean for your library, right? Because at first I thought you were referring to Librivox, which offers free recordings of public-domain books read by amateur volunteers.
You can sometimes find cheap copies of used audiobooks on Amazon, ebay, etc.
Chirp audiobooks offers some good deals on sale-price audiobooks. Their selection is limited, and keeps changing, and you have to use their own app to listen, but I’ve gotten a few good deals there.
If you do go with Audible, make sure you know what you’re getting. It’s not a subscription service. That $15/month (or whatever it is) buys you one book per month of your choice to keep, plus a few other benefits (such as the opportunity to buy other audiobooks at members’ prices and, sometimes, at deeply discounted sale prices).
In past threads other Dopers have mentioned Scribd.com, which is a subscription service (i.e. you pay a set fee per month for unlimited temporary access to whatever they have available), but I have no experience with them.
And Audible is one book per month, but the book “ticket” doesn’t expire for 6 months. So what generally happens is that we splurge on 3-4 books every couple of months. But our audiobook consumption and cost is dwarfed by our bookstore purchases. We like authors and reading and want to keep them going!
Yup, I love my public library system. However sadly they don’t always have the books I want.
It just seems kind of excessive to pay $15/month for the small number of books I can’t get via the library. Normally I could get physical media audiobooks at the library but its shut down due to the virus.
The Internet Archive has a surprising number of public domain audiobooks and lots of other interesting stuff to read, listen to, play in one of their emulators, etc. You should be able to find a few years worth of entertainment there.
I know a lot of this is not exactly what you’re looking for but there are so many rabbit holes there (vintage concert posters anyone?) that you could spend years digesting everything they have there. Kind of like getting caught going down the rabbit hole of threads here.
Kindle Unlimited is $10 a month (two free months with Amazon prime) and they have a rotating selection of audiobooks taken from Audible for you to listen to for the duration of your subscription.
I posted about this a few month ago and didn’t really get much response. I like audio books for cycling and commuting and I was looking into Audible as well.
On an individual book basis, I found Audible is generally about 40% more than Apple Books, so I’ve been using Apple lately for spot purchases.
I also use Libravox and download them via Apple podcasts.
You don’t need an audible subscription. Just keep an eye open for audiobooks that are on special. Especially if you already own the ebook, you can sometimes get really good deals on the audiobook, like from $1.99-$7.49.
I do like LibriVox for free audiobooks, but finding readers that you enjoy and that have sufficiently good recording equipment can be a bit of a challenge sometimes.
