Audiobooks – listen to bestseller books read aloud to you!
by Toni McQuilken
Oct 25, 2012 9:10 AM –
Install
Audiobooks allows you to listen to books read aloud to you on your Android phone or tablet from a library of more than 15,000 bestsellers and new releases. It is a free app with a trial offer until the monthly subscription kicks in. Will it replace your tradition paper books or your need to read for yourself on your device? Find out more in our review!
Price: Free, $29.95/month subscription
Tested on: Samsung Galaxy S3
Content Rating: Everyone
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Good quality audio books!
- Decent book selection!
- Easy to use!
Cons
- The price is a bit high for the subscription.
Features:
Audiobooks is an Android app that allows you to stream books to your device. The app itself is free, but after the trial, it is $29.95 per month. You do have to input your credit card information to sign up for the trial.
As an app, it is actually pretty decent. I’m a huge reader, but I also tend to be picky about what I read. I was surprised to find a good mix of genres, and that it included both classics, as well as a lot of current best sellers. I would have liked to see more current books, but that was more a product of it not having some of the specific books on my reading list, rather than it not having a good overall selection.
There are a few features that will let you bookmark and save favorites, making it easy to mark books you want to go back to as you browse the catalog. The actual browsing part is done by things like trending books, but you can also browse by genre, or search for specific authors or titles. My one complaint was that, after I clicked on a book to bring it up, when I went back to browsing, it was all the way at the top of the list again. Since some of the lists are long, it was just a bit of an irritation to have to scroll down and find where I had left off. It’s not a big issue, but it was something I noticed, since I was doing a lot of browsing and reading book descriptions, so I was doing a lot of going back and forth.
Once you choose a book, you essentially download it, although you can beginning listening to it as soon as it opens. Each book comes with about 3 minutes of free trail – to hear the rest, you have to be a paid subscriber.
I was pretty impressed with the quality of the audio. It was crisp and clear, and the inflections of the books I listened to were good enough to convey the story. As far as audio books go, I really thought they did a good job. And if you download the book while you’re in range of a strong WiFi signal, it will both go faster, and ensure that you won’t get cut off if you happen to go through an area with weak or no cellular signal. In fact, you can, in the settings, set the app up to download books via WiFi only, or allow it to use the cell networks, depending on your data plan and usage.
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Audiobooks The Hunger Games
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Audiobooks Featured
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Audiobooks Book Details
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Audiobooks Transfer
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Audiobooks Login
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Audiobooks Settings
Usefulness:
If you’re a big audio book person, then this is going to be a useful app for you. It brings together a wide range of titles and genres, and it is very easy to use, with high quality audible readers.
Ease of Use:
Other than the one minor issue I had of it always returning to the top of the page, rather than where I left off, it actually worked very well. I didn’t have any problems navigating the app or finding books, and they played without any issues whatsoever, even in my car over Bluetooth.
Frequently Used:
This depends on your personal usage to be honest. Some people just want audio books for when they travel, others listen to them every day driving to and from work. Either way, it will be the go-to app for any of your audio book needs.
Interface:
As I mentioned, the interface is very easy to navigate. It’s clean and well labeled, and I didn’t have any problems with it, not even when it automatically paused for an incoming call.