Normally I don’t endorse getting into a closed ecosystem of a big brand, but with audiobooks it’s different. There’s not much out there in way of alternatives, and audiobooks are bulky enough to be a pain to manage. Audible has made a great system to buy, try, gift and listen to audiobooks all day across all your devices.
Don’t drink and drive, get high on literature instead!
And now, for the corporate self-made holiday that is shoved down our throats whether we want to or not, there is Prime Day. Yay! Or not.
Anyway, it’s a great way to test out Audible. I have a subscription. You can have one too. At a discount, too (It’s worth it).
And we can give you some audiobooks for free! Really. Just get an account, head on to our Audiobooks page and ask for the title you want. We’ll gift it to you.
Here’s something I thought of, and wanted to share with you in case it helps: Put your older smartphone to use by making it an audiobook device.
Here’s why that’s helpful:
Phone storage. Audiobooks actually take up hundreds of megabytes of space. It’s very easy to fill up your phone’s memory, and a hassle to start shifting things around. If you’re like me, who listens to 2-3 audiobooks alternatively depending on the mood, you’ll need about 1 gigabyte of space reserved for them.
Phone battery. The playback draws quite a bit of battery. Instead of draining your phone overnight and wearing the battery life, just push your old phone to its very limits.
Audible syncs your listens and library across all devices. You can still use your own phone or tablet as normal, and the listening points will sync if you have WiFi on. Simple as that.
Separate car device for playback. If your car lacks smartdevice capabilities, you can just use an old phone and plug it in. Here’s Audible’s own advice for car listening.
In this time and age, there’s no way you can’t get your hands on an older smartphone that’s sitting unused in a shelf somewhere. You can use it without a SIM card, load Audible on it and connect to your account. There’s no limit to how many devices you can connect to one Amazon account, though you might get a security warning.
For example, I’m using my perfectly capable Nokia Lumia, which I discarded because I got fed up with the Windows Phone app ecosystem. Audible’s app is available on Windows Phones, so there’s no problem with playback and syncing. You can put the sleep timer to use and have the audiobook playback stop at a reasonable point:
If you’re listening to James Masters’ deep, lulling voice, the sleep timer button is your friend.
Also, here are two more accessories you might need for audiobook listening:
Noise cancelling earbuds, for outside listening.
A bus or a train ride can become noisy enough to prevent you from listening in to your book. Especially train rides, their decibel levels are shocking when you pay attention to them. You could use active noise cancelling, but those are more expensive and I honestly don’t like the separation from the environment while being outside. It’s one thing making an hour-long commute bearable by listening to a few pages, and quite another to completely shut yourself out of the world. The passive earbuds are good enough to let you listen in noisy environments.
Tip: The button can start or stop playback.
A flexible, spider grip holder for your phone.
This is one of the more useful things you can shop for. you can adjust the grip so it holds up your phone on the desk, ties around a night-stand lamp or sits nicely on your car dashboard.
Tip: As an added bonus, it can scare the crap out of someone at proper illumination levels!
At Mythography we create mainly digital goods, so that is a decision that is not taken lightly.
DRM does not work as advertised, and results in a poor customer experience.
Piracy is of course a big issue, but we believe that people who want to support a project will happily buy the original. We do that all the time, we buy the original copy and support the creators.
We do not advocate piracy, nor are we against digital goods protection. We have been burned by DRM as consumers many times and we do not want a single one of our customers to feel the same way. DRM creates issues even with legitimate uses, transferring your original digital goods to a new device, reading the same book on your brother’s tablet, backing up the stuff you bought on your computer to do a format, not having access to workshop UGC on Steam etc. Even being offline on a trip or during a move is troublesome.
We are simply saying that our choice will always be DRM-free.
If you’re looking for more publishing houses that advocate DRM-free, Baen Books is one of the biggest with the same ideology. You bought it, you own it.
2016 UPDATE #2. We have partnered up with the amazing Streetlib team from Italy, for expanded Europe distribution. Their DRM is “soft,” just a watermark that never prohibits a user from copying his files into another of his devices. They assure us it is so and they seem to agree with us, but if anything changes we will make sure to address that.
2016 UPDATE #3. Regarding Audible. Before we get called out because of the Audible DRM, we need to explain ourselves on the audiobook issue. Audiobook production costs a few thousand, and Amazon’s ACX helps streamline that expensive process and reduce some of the costs through exclusivity. We hope the DRM it enforces on Audible products is not too damaging to the user experience. But you have to understand, that there is really no alternative to audiobook production and distribution. The only choices for now are either go with DRM and ACX, or simply not do audiobooks. We have made a decision to go with it on this particular channel, and are looking for any alternatives that might show up in the future.
2018 UPDATE #4. Streetlib has allowed even the watermark removed, so we’re going DRM-free even from that.
2018 UPDATE #5. After talking with our partners, the content provided through libraries does have DRM enabled. That allows “lending” of an ebook for a limited time, it gets disabled after the lending period is finished. That is the only way for libraries to enforce the distribution of ebooks through the system, giving out one copy per book only at the same time. Obviously this is a form of limiting DRM and it falls into the category we dislike, but it’s utilitarian.
2018 UPDATE #6. In this never-ending battle against this stupidity, Google Play books now shows our titles as DRM protected. However, our aggregator called PublishDrive assures us that it is simply a watermark, called soft-DRM.
2018 UPDATE #7. PublishDrive has removed all forms of DRM from our titles.
