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VPNs for ad-blocking While Audiobooks.com doesn’t have the star power, original content or seemingly limitless podcast advertising that Audible does, there’s still a lot here for those keen to try their luck with a slightly different riff on the audiobook subscription service formula. Like Audible, Audiobooks.com does offer more expansive and expensive plans for those who expect to get through more than one book each month. $28.90 per month gets you 2 credits per month while $40.85 gets you 3 credits. On the other hand, Audiobooks.com doesn’t give you the option to save money by paying for a year up-front like Audible does. Both services offer a 30-day free trial, but be sure to check out the table below for a better understanding of how the pricing works before you sign up with either Audible or Audiobooks.com. Check out the table below for a sense of how Audiobooks.com sits relative to other content streaming subscription services. You pay a monthly fee. That gets you a credit. This can then be traded in for any single title within the wider Audiobooks.com library. Titles can also be bought on a one-off basis, but doing so does cost extra. Prices range from as little as around $1 for a single release to as much as over $200. It very much depends on what you’re after. For the vast majority of titles however, the exchange of a single credit represents a decent deal. Credits expire if they aren’t used, but Audiobooks.com will let you top up your membership with more at a premium. As an alternative to trading them in for a single title, credits can also be spent on access to an Audiobook Club. A single credit gets you 30 days of all-you-can-hear access to every title included in the club. At the time of writing, there are eight clubs to choose from. Most of these are divided by genre, but there’s a more generic “Best Of” club for those who want a little bit of everything. The upside here is that you get a lot more bang for your buck, but the downside is that the selection of titles in any given club can be a bit hit and miss. In either of the above cases, Audiobooks acquired via Audiobooks.com can be listened to via a web browser or the Audiobooks.com app. As you’d expect, the latter is available on both iOS and Android. While this plethora of playback options doesn’t exactly put Audible to shame, it’s hard to complain too much about how the basics are covered here. As for the size of the library involved, Audiobooks.com claims to offer a whopping 350,000 titles. If your tastes are anywhere near the mainstream, you’ll likely be well-served here. That said, it didn’t take me long to find the odd omission here. More than once, I went looking for a specific, admittedly semi-obscure title only to find that it wasn’t available here but was available through Audible. If you’ve got a specific shortlist of potential reads in mind, it’s well worth scouting things out before you sign up for either service. Despite these discrepancies, most of what works about the subscription-based model of audiobook distribution remains intact with Audiobooks.com’s take on the premise. First of these is the VIP Selection. In addition to their standard allowance of credits, Audiobooks.com subscribers get a second book from this collection each month for free. If you’re a brand new subscriber, you’ll get another book on top of that. This is a solid idea that, on paper, gives an Audiobooks.com subscription a slight edge over Audible when it comes to overall value for money. Unfortunately, in practice, your mileage with the VIP selection may probably vary. Mine certainly did. Even if the titles on offer change from month to month, it’s far from uncommon for the curated collection to feel like more of a bargain bin than a bonafide bonus. Like regular credits, VIP credits also expire at the end of a given month. Given how easy it is to trawl the dozen or so throwaway titles on offer and come away empty, the potential appeal of this perk is quick to curdle and a poor match for Audible’s own Plus Collection. Audiobooks.com does offer its own selection of entirely-free audiobooks, but these are mostly public domain titles with questionable production values. There’s a similarly prevalent lack of polish to be found when it comes to the Audiobooks.com app. If Audible is sometimes painfully streamlined, the main menu on the Audiobook.com app is bursting at the seams. There’s podcast integration, access to clubs, dedicated note-taking, a dedicated recommendations queue and a shortcut to member-exclusive deals. It’s feature-packed, but it all gets a bit overwhelming at times. To Audiobooks.com’s credit, the fundamentals are more or less solid. The app supports offline playback, variable playback speed, sleep timers and AirPlay 2 output if you’re using an iOS device. However, whenever I left the safety net of situations where the Audiobooks.com app didn’t have to do anything beyond letting me listen to audio content, the interface felt sluggish and weighted down by all UI baggage involved.
