Audible’s new proposed royalty structure is a slap in the face to authors, readers who care about them, and exactly opposite of what they promised Brandon Sanderson barely a year ago.
It is an attempt to seize a monopoly by punishing authors until they agree to exclusivity, which would drive Audible’s competitors out of the market.
I like Audible. Every so often after many attempts to even get me pay 0.99€/month they offere me a free access for 7 days and I can download one book I choose for free.
The only issue is they use their own DRM protected .aax format so I can’t listen to the books offline.
The only issue with that format is that it’s a non-issue.
I can recommend http://libro.fm/. Employee-owned company that shares profits with independent book stores. Buy audiobooks, then stream them through the app or download them to whichever fucking device you like.
Third for libro.fm. I add them to my own server after purchase with a librofm downloader, that works great. Audiobookshelf to play the books. Hardcover to track my reading, wish lists, and book reviews. Great experience.
I could sail for the audible exclusives. I don’t, but I could.
I second Libro. Been using it for about a year now, and they just straight up give you MP3s, an app for mobile, or a browser stream.
Hello, which country are they based ? I didn’t find the info on their website.I found it, they are from us so no protection for consumers and your data are in Trump and it’s goons hand as soon as they ask. Read a book not far right enough -> tagged as communist. Avoid everything coming from this country.Another way to look at this would be that independent book stores in the US should be supported especially because Trump and his goons want to get rid of them. But if you have a good EU-based alternative, I would of course be very interested in that.
Hello perfect, the enemy of good.
Truly, in other cases. But the us are spearheading the autoritarisme and have no protection laws, won’t risk it.
LibreVox offers audiobooks for free. You can download or help record them. It’s like Gutenberg for audiobooks. Like Gutenberg, it’s mostly old/classic books, though.
I also recommend pirate bay. Lots of free audiobooks there too.
I quit buying books from Amazon last year and will never go back. I will say it is extremely annoying to buy ebooks elsewhere because we are a mixed device household so I have to jump through hoops to get the ebook on whichever device. I actually had to sign out of the kindle completely to make it work the way I wanted, (only show the books I have loaded on it and nothing else) but now it prompts me to log back in every time I switch books.
I hope we get to see the day of DRM free ebooks that we can use however we want.
Might I recommend the free software Caliber? It can strip DRM off of ebooks. It’s not as good as buying them without it to begin with, but it’s a solution.
I also recommend this one
I used it to get my audiobooks out of my Amazon account before deleting it.
You know Amazon does this for books too. But as an author I just say no and publish on as many platforms as I can.
I know nothing about publishing but it seems to me more platforms greater exposure
any platform that tries to monopolize content is a no from me. I just won’t buy anything that’s hosted by them. simple as that.
Then under the smallest amount of pressure from rising fascism, those exclusive books suddenly cease to exist.
Maybe deactivated in some countries; perhaps users will loose their accounts ( and all books), should they circumvent the national bans.
Owned by Amazon.
Fuck amazon
I get them all from torrents anyway.
Is this why they recently remade my favorite 10- book series with a terrible new narrator, which they’re now trying to sell me?
Wheel of Time?
Belgariad/Malloreon
It’s actually 12 books, but the last two are prequels. They seem to have only remade the first 9 so far, and the last book already had a terrible narrator.
10- book series
Wheel of Time?
That’s a weird way to spell “14-book-plus-a-prequel series.”
I’m not sure how many books Sanderson wrote, so I thought maybe someone might only consider the ones written by Jordan, which would put it closer to 10. And it’s the only series I know off the top of my head that has had at least a few of the books rerecorded by Amazon with new narrators (actors from the show) to replace the older narrators. I figured I’d hazard a guess (hence the question mark) and be corrected rather than just ask the question, especially considering the internet’s tendency to enjoy telling someone they are wrong more than answering a question.
Which series do you think it is?
Oh it was a fine guess, I didn’t need to um ackshually you. I know my wife prefers the new recordings with Rosamund Pike over the old Michael Kramer/Kate Reading versions.
I must admit I always fall into the correcting people trap.
For what it’s worth though, RJ wrote 11 main series books and the prequel, BrandoSando wrote 3. And after reading those three I had to go read everything else BrandoSando wrote. Love that guy‘s worldbuilding and magic systems.
I don’t have a better guess. 😅
If you are looking to move away from Audible but don’t want to split your library over multiple apps, then you should take a look at https://audible-tools.kamsker.at/
Audible allows you to download your books in their proprietary format directly from the website. The website linked above converts those into actually usable files to put onto your audiobookshelf instance or whatever. Plus it’s all just ffmpeg under the hood. So once you converted one file online to get your 4bit “decryption key” you can do the rest locally
I believe you can also do that in calibre.
AI narrators and ebooks will put Audible out of business.
Ever listen to any YouTube videos narrated by AI? So many mispronounced words and strange inflections.
Ha did they finally found a use case for AI ? Last time I checked it wasn’t even able to read a book without making things up. But OCR and text to speech exist since years and can’t beat humain warmth.
