An Audible user review
By Brittney MacDonald, Life & Style Editor
Have you heard of Audible? Chances are if you have surfed the Internet at all in the past year or so, you have. It seems like every web or YouTube celebrity has a sponsorship from Audible, and is therefore required to promote it—over and over again. The advertisements may be annoying but is the actual service worth trying out?
For those of you unfamiliar with it, Audible is a branch of Amazon that specializes in audiobooks. Through their app you can listen to readings of pretty much any book you can think of. Their library is extremely vast. And we’re not talking about just some guy reading aloud in his basement; most of these recordings are well-produced, much like the wee radio dramas of old (think the radio broadcast of War of the Worlds that happens every year around Halloween).
For some people this option is amazing, for me it’s less than impressive.
My first issue with Audible is the concept of audiobooks as a whole. I read extremely quickly, but with an audio book you can’t control the speed at which you absorb it. If the recording is 10 hours long, you need to sit there for 10 hours. Not to mention that for some books, especially ones that are filled with exposition, you have to listen to the narrator describe each and every detail, whereas with a real book you can just skim past all that.
I suppose that this could be a benefit to any slow readers, or people that find it hard to find the time or motivation to sit down and read. Instead you can just plug this into your headphones or speaker and listen.
My second issue with Audible, and probably the biggest one, is the cost. Audible charges a monthly fee in order for you to use their services. Their cheapest plan is $14.95 and includes one free book a month. Any additional books you may desire cost an average of $8 per novel. To me, all of that seems incredibly pricey considering an album on iTunes has a one-time cost of about $8-$10, without the addition of any monthly fee.
My third issue is that novels can’t be purchased through the app. You have to go to the website, either through your device’s browser, or through your computer in order to get a new book, and then you have to download it before you can listen. It’s a bit of an inconvenience.
All in all I wasn’t impressed with Audible, and will probably be cancelling my subscription before my 30-day free trial is up.
