Today we’re starting an entirely new chapter for our audiobooks offering by making more than 150,000 audiobooks available as part of Spotify Premium subscriptions.
First to the UK & Australia, but will later expand to the US.
The first taste is free. Next thing you know you're hooked, addicted to audiobooks, selling your print book collection to buy more audiobooks. When those are gone, how far will you go to feed the monster?
Having a quick look the fact that it is using a similar system to audible with the "gift you a credit per month" bullshit then that's a hard no for me.
I go through multiple books every month, on my heaviest listening weeks I will usually listen to 35 - 40 hours worth so a single "premium" book and then a load of free trash like audible just doesn't cut it for me.
Scribd seemed like a better option but they will stop you from listening to certain things after like 15 hours. So I was locked out half way through a book, I could go listen to other books but who the fuck wants to listen to books in halves or quarters then wait until the next month to continue.
Yeh a book doesn't last me for very long at all and audio books as they are right now are vastly over priced in my opinion so even discounted I would be spending hundreds a month if I bought everything I listen to.
I definitely appreciate that the files they give to you are DRM free, that is the way it should be, but really I wanted something more like Netflix. Something where I can save money on the cost of buying the large amount of books I get through and instead pay a subscription for it and just streaming the content itself.
Considering that most audiobooks (after the discount) fall in at around $0.75/hr, you'd have to be listening to 4ish hours a day to break a hundred bucks a month (unless you listen at a higher playback speed; I don't). 2-3 hours a day is probably my personal average.
I'm not one to bash pirating - I do it for audiobooks with exclusivity deals from time to time. But I hope that if you are pirating all your audiobooks that you donate to the author directly to make up for it.