Audiobooks.com: Get audiobooks

I recently switched back to Audiobooks from another similar service/app. The other one was cheaper, but it turns out you get what you pay for. Other service randomly denied the books I was right in the middle of and took a few days to fix the issue that came with an update. The other part that really drove me away was I had banked up a few credits, as I listen to about 1 book in a little over a month, I had the service stop charging me so I could catch up. They cut off my whole service in the process. I had to keep my service charging me to finish the book I was in the middle of and then leave a credit behind when I left their service. Audiobooks has never cut me off mid book. Their business model views credits you’ve purchased as yours and honors their use regardless of whether you commit to remaining a customer. I will gladly pay the extra few dollars a month for that level of service to finish the series I’m halfway through, The Sword of Truth (I’m up to Chainfire now).

I’m on the second day of my 60-day trial. I like the interface of the app - the part that controls playback and bookmarking and things like that. I was pleasantly surprised at the number of titles in my favorite genres - sci-fi and fantasy (mostly fantasy). I wish there were better search, sort, and filter features, as well as a more effective recommendation feature. One should be able to sort and filter by sub-genres, author, series, narrators, etc. For instance, fantasy has many genres- dark/grim dark fantasy, epic fantasy, sword and sorcery, urban fantasy, classics (wheel of time and fellowship of the ring) etc. in the app, “Adult” appears to mean fantasy with sex and romance. What I thought it meant, and what I wanted it to mean Was that it filters out all the kids’ books. It also would be helpful to be able to filter out books you’ve already read - especially for the recommendation feature. It seems logical that if a person has rated a book, then he or she has already read it, and the book shouldn’t appear under the recommendation list. Maybe these features are available but I haven’t learned to use them properly. After all, it is only my second day. Despite all my griping, I really think I will have fun learning the new app and exploring its many offerings.

ask user to change the rating

Not ready for primetime, at least on my iphone 7 running 12.4.1. The basic problem is the thing is always looking for a network connection before it wants to play, even if you’ve downloaded the book to your device. Very often if you want to start listening when you don’t have a connection (and lots of us live in rural areas where the network goes in and out depending on where you are) the app just refuses to open, sticking on a spinning logo. Further, once it does open, and the books is playing, it will shut down again regularly if it goes through an area with no connection - again, this is trying to play books that you have downloaded to your phone specifically to get around the problem of spotty networks. Finally, when you’re back up and running, it will give you a dialog showing a choice between two saved bookmarks and will ask you which one of these you want to start playing from - usually neither of these bookmarks are within 10 minutes of where you actually stopped listening. I contacted the company once to see if I was doing anything wrong, and the nice young lady somewhat sheepishly acknowledged that the problems I outlined did indeed exist. There’s been at least one update since then, but it hasn’t got any better. It’s a shame, because I really want there to be a solid competitor to Audible, but Audiobooks dot com books can only be played on this app, and this app is really quite poor.

I’ve just started using this app, but it seems to be everything you need and nothing you don’t. Not only does it have a good selection of books, plus an additional VIP book per month, the app function itself is ideal. It’s got a sleep timer, bookmarks for when you want to go back to something that really impacted you, plus the ability to change the speed which I usually bump up to 1.5 when I listen to audiobooks now. It helps me get so much more reading in, and you don’t sacrifice quality in the process. I also LOVE that it shows where you are in the book as a whole (like 1:55 of 7:42) but it gives you different tracks within that too! It’s really nice to get to see it broken down in little chunks in addition to your total progress. I first listened to the free VIP book “Nudge” and it was surprisingly good! Something I wouldn’t have normally picked to read but thought “why not” and I’m glad I did. We’ll see how things continue to go, but so far I think it’s a good service and a well functioning app.

I just got this app yesterday but so far so good. There is one feature I can’t seem to find and am slightly annoyed by. However that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but if it does I wish it was easier to figure out. Here it is, it seems like you get to select a playback option in the settings (for example mine is 30 seconds) but after you choose it seems you’re stuck with just that option. Sure change it again but I’d like to be able to go back 30 seconds AND go back a chapter. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to restart a chapter or select a chapter specifically. Now like I said I haven’t spent any time looking for any tips or instructions for using this app, so maybe it’s right there and I haven’t realized it yet. But if that’s the case then I’d say this app is quite similar to audible, but not as user friendly in that way. Still, I’d recommend this app for anyone wanting to listen to audiobooks. The playback thing is minor and may not bother most people so clearly they’re doing everything else ok, so worth a download if you’re interested in audiobooks.