Audiobook Deals ... And Where to Find Them
My best tips... The latest in our paid series: "How to Build a Personal Library Without Breaking the Bank."
This post is the latest one in my paid series "How to Read Voraciously and Build a Personal Library Without Breaking the Bank." This is the sixth post, and paid subscriber or not, you can see a list of the previous topics at the top of the above link. Also, Substack has this cool new feature where you can see one free teaser post (in the Substack app) that is behind the paywall. I’ve just turned this feature on, so maybe if you’re not already a paid subscriber, you might like to use your one teaser post to check out the post below or one of the earlier posts in this series?
Audiobooks are a booming part of the publishing world, and industry insiders expect that the demand for them will continue to rapidly expand over the next decade. I’m not really interested in the debate about whether listening to audiobooks counts as reading. Yes, listening is a different experience than reading “with your eyeballs” (as one of my friends puts it) and our cognition of the text certainly will vary across different media. But audiobooks do allow us to enjoy books when we are on the go, and in situations when we can’t read a book (or ebook) with our eyes.
Personally, I’m not the hugest audiobook fan, but I do enjoy them when I’m on long runs or long car drives, and occasionally when I’m doing routine tasks at my computer. I would probably listen more than I do, but as an aging introvert I appreciate small chunks of silence – in the car or on shorter walks or runs – whenever I can get them! I enjoy listening to fiction books more than nonfiction ones, but since most of the audiobooks I listen to are streamed through our local library, and since I don’t devote a ton of time to listening, I actually listen to more nonfiction books that are shorter because I can finish them before their checkout expires.
Although audiobooks generally tend to be more expensive than print books (especially if you mostly buy used print books), I have over the last decade found a number of easy ways to get free and cheap audiobooks, which I will share with you here…
As is true for books and ebooks, your best bet for FREE audiobooks is the public library (either your local library, or if your local library is small, an account through a larger library system that has an extensive digital collection. I explored all this thoroughly in this earlier post in this series.)
Another excellent option for free audiobooks is the Librivox app, which offers free editions of public domain books. Librivox’s audiobooks have been created by its community of readers, and as a result quality can vary significantly. And of course, being limited to public domain books severely restricts the number of titles that are available. But if you’re wanting to listen to classics (say Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or The Brothers Karamazov) Librivox is a great way to do that for free!
A bunch of other recommendations for thrifty audiobook readers continue after the paywall. (Please consider subscribing, if you haven’t done so already. And deep gratitude to those who have! This series alone will save you significantly more money than the cost of an annual susbscription. )