Hi everyone. I'm Catriona and welcome to
another installment of my guide to audiobook series.
Today I'm going to be talking about
how you can get your hands
on audiobooks either for a reasonable
price or even better for free since
buying audiobooks themselves especially
physically can be pretty damn expensive.
I'm gonna begin talking about some of
the paid services or rather
subscriptions where you can get your
hands on audiobooks because generally
these have a much larger selection
of audiobooks available.
After that I will get into some of the ways
that you can get them for free.
The subscription services that I'm gonna be
highlighting today, the ones I'm talking
about in a little more detail are the
ones that I personally have at least
trialed if not used frequently.
The first one I'm going to be talking about is Audible.
Out of all of these subscription
services after the trial Audible is the
one that I've continued purchasing.
I've been subscribed to it for a couple of
years now and the main reason for this
is because of their selection.
I think they have over 200,000 titles available
and you can listen to audiobooks either
on your computer or through their Audible app.
Some of the features in this
app which I find really helpful are the
variable playback speed so you can speed
up or slow down the narration.
This is very handy if the narrator talks quite
slowly and you want to speed things along
a little bit and listen to that audiobook faster.
There's also a sleep timer as well.
If you are reading while you're
going to bed you can set a time
after that point it will stop playing
the audiobook, so it doesn't actually
keep on playing the audiobook for hours
and hours until it finishes and you're
actually able to kind of go back to roughly
where you dozed off and find your spot again.
You're also able to skip either
forwards or backwards 30 seconds
which is super useful if you find
yourself getting distracted,
which I do quite a lot,
you can skip back in 30 second increments
until a point where you remember what happened.
These features aren't only in the Audible app.
A lot of the ones I'm talking about today do have
all of these features as well but I just
wanted to go in a little more detail
when I first mentioned them.
As for memberships Audible does actually offer
a couple of different types.
The very basic one is the gold membership
which is 14.95 US dollars a month and for this
you get one audiobook and you also are
able to get thirty percent off any
additional audiobooks that you want to buy.
The platinum membership is
22.95 US dollars a month
and that gives you two credits as well
as that thirty percent discount and with
these memberships you are able to also
purchase them annually so you will get a
slightly discounted prices as well.
Audible is one of the more expensive
subscription services but one of the
things I really like about them is that
they frequently have sales or promotions going on.
One of my favorites is when
they do the promotion where you buy two
audiobooks and get your third free so
you can get three audiobooks for the
price of 2 or two credits.
They also occasionally do discounted
prices of specific audiobooks.
They do offer a 30 day free trial as well where
you get one free credit to buy an audiobook of
anything that you want.
I do have an affiliate link as well for that so
I will leave a link to that below if you
are interested, but if you do decide to
cancel after the 30 day trial I know
that you're still able to access that
audiobook and continue listening to it.
So that's a really handy thing to note.
The next subscription I'm going to be
talking about is Scribd.
I'm not actually sure how many
audiobook titles that Scribd has available.
The only numbers I've been able to find talk
about their total titles and that
includes their ebooks and magazines and
other documents and stuff like that so
I'm not actually sure how many
audiobooks they have on offer but I think
it's quite a lot and you can listen to
them either on your computer through
their website or on your app as well.
Because I no longer have a membership for Scribd,
I'm not able to go into the app
and actually look at all of the features.
If any of you do have a membership
to Scribd and don't mind
leaving a comment talking about some of
the features that the app has, especially
in comparison to Audible, that would be
super super useful. Their membership cost
is 8.99 US dollars a month and I know
that when they first started out it used
to be unlimited access to ebooks and
audiobooks but now you're able to access
three ebooks and one audiobook each
month with that subscription.
And I do believe they have other documents and
magazines which you have unlimited access to.
Scribd also offers a monthly
selection of books and audiobooks that
you can access for free so that's their
Scribd selects section of the website.
So any of those that are listed you can
get access to without actually paying
anything as well, which is a bonus.
Scribd also has a 30 day free trial but
if you cancel after those 30 days you
don't actually have access to that
audiobook that you purchased for free.
That's why I'm not able to access the app and
actually show you what the features are,
because it doesn't let me touch them anymore.
The last service I'm gonna be talking about
is audiobooks from Audiobooks.com.
You can listen to these audiobooks
either on your computer or through
their app and some of the features
include the variable playback speed and
the sleep timer as well. The membership
cost for this is 14.95 US dollars a month
in which you receive one audiobook
with that credit and they do also
offer a 30 day free trial.
Now this is the one I'm least familiar with,
so I'm not a hundred percent sure what happens
after the free trial if you're still
able to access it or not. I can't remember.
Now these are not the only
services available out there.
There's actually quite a lot if you go searching
for it but the ones I've mentioned are the
ones that I have actually tried but if
any of these don't sound that great to
you or you want to try something
different I will include a list down
below of some of the other services and
ways that you can buy audiobooks.
One of them that I can think of off the top of
my head is iBooks but just having a
look at the prices you actually buy the
audiobooks and it seems like the cost is
pretty much the same as if you'd bought a
physical one because there's price
ranging from like thirteen dollars to
about forty dollars which is... ouch.
Now moving on to the free services.
You're able to get audiobooks for free from your library.
It's likely that they'll actually have
some physical audio books
that you can borrow so if you go into
your library you should be able to
borrow some of the CDs. I'm not sure if
these are as popular now but you used to
be able to get talking books which were actual
devices with cartridges so it wasn't
actually a CD. It's been awhile since
I've borrowed an audiobook from my
library, so I'm not sure if this is still
around a lot but there's the talking
books or cds which you can obviously use
to listen on your computer or when
you're in the car. In addition to that
your local library may also have digital
audiobooks on offer to listen to through
a variety of different apps. So what you
do is you get that app and you connect
your library account to that and then
you're able to access the audiobook library
and often ebook library as well which is a bonus.
You will need to take a look
at what apps your library uses so then
you can download that and connect your account.
Obviously since you are using your library
you're only borrowing the books,
so you'll have it for a certain
amount of time and that totally depends
on your library as well. I know that my
one has recently upped the borrowing
time from two weeks to three weeks.
The selection of audiobooks available as
well is completely dependent on your
library so it just depends which ones
they have acquired and made available to you.
So generally because the selection is a little
more limited instead of having a certain
audiobook in mind and searching to see
if I have it, I actually just go through
the list of all the audiobooks that
they have on offer and see which ones
I'm interested in. If I do it the other
way around then I'm typically disappointed.
So there are two apps that
you can connect with through your library
that I'm going to be mentioning.
The first one is Overdrive which I think is
probably the most well-known and this
one you can listen to on your computer
or through the app. The app also has the
variable playback speed, the sleep timer,
and you're able to skip forward or
backward in 15 second increments.
The last app that I'm going to be talking
about is Borrow Box. And this one is
associated with Bolinda Audio which is
an audiobook publisher. I think a lot of
the books that I have, at least borrowed from my
library, I know have been published by
Bolinda and with this one you're only
able to listen to it on the app.
I don't think they have a computer platform for
listening to audiobooks. At least not yet
as far as I can find. So this one also has
the standard features of variable
playback speed and skipping in
thirty second increments. So those are
some of the apps that I personally have
tried myself and would recommend if
you're looking to start listening to
audiobooks and are not sure where to begin.
Definitely take a look at the list
I've included in the description of
this video as well for any additional
apps and services in case none of those
take your fancy. And if any of you know
of any additional services that I
haven't actually included then please
please let me know so I can add that to
the list as well. So it makes it easier
for everybody else to find them.
But that is pretty much it for this video.
I'm very curious to know how
you like to get your audiobooks.
Are you like me and spend that little
extra money going through Audible
or is there another service that you prefer?
Or are you more loyal to your library?
Nevertheless I hope you found
this video helpful and thank you for watching.
The next video that I'm going
to be sharing in the guide to audiobook
series is going to be talking about some
of my favorite audiobooks.
What I would recommend to you,
particularly if you're just starting out.
But I will see you tomorrow with another video,
and until then I'll talk to you in the comments. Bye!
