I used to do this enthusiastically, but now I don’t even try.Īside from subscriber promotions, I search for and buy books on the main Amazon platform, which, to be fair, integrates seamlessly with Audible. Because subscriber promotions are fenced off away from the main site, you can’t search for books in the offer, you have to scroll through all the books you don’t want to read. The Audible site is terrible to navigate and the promotions discussed above are particularly poor. Poor discoverability and layout on Audible This was what made it different from bookshops where the most visible books were usually the ones that publishers had paid to promote. These also tend to be authors that have publishing deals with (surprise, surprise) Audible or the wider Amazon ecosystem.Īmazon built its brand on showing customers what it believes the customer most wants to see. Now, however, it seems that the same authors are promoted over and over again. (For the uninitiated, every audiobook costs one credit to a subscriber, so a book that’s 5 hours long costs the same as one that is 50 hours long. In the past I’ve discovered interesting new authors through these promotions, and picked up the odd book which I wanted to read but couldn’t justify using a credit on. Audible price promotions and 2-for-1 promotionsĪudible offers price promotions that are exclusive to subscribers. Now it has three different apps, each with their own strengths so I often find books I’m looking for, and also happen across interesting books I would otherwise have missed. It was a struggle to find books I would enjoy. When I first started listening to audiobooks, my library had a fairly limited selection from one app with a heavy emphasis on commercial fiction and backlist titles. Better selection of audiobooks from libraries

So is an Audible subscription still good value? These are some of the factors I’m weighing up.

I’m wondering if I’ll cancel my subscription altogether when it runs out in the summer. I’m down to the 12 books per year plan (£69.99 or £5.83 per book) and haven’t bought as many (and have a small stockpile of unfinished books to get through). At the time I was an enthusiastic subscriber to the Audible 24 books per year plan. I wrote a couple of years ago about my conversion to audiobooks.

Audible monthly cost