I would rather listen than read

January 19, 2015 8:17 PM

I've discovered I prefer listening to audiobooks to reading paper books. I have an Audible.com subscription, but some books I want to listen to are not available on Audible. Are there other sites where I might find audiobooks Audible doesn't have? It seems that some books are simply never recorded - why is that? Is there anything I can do to encourage the publisher to produce an audiobook of a particular title?
posted by southern_sky to Writing & Language (7 answers total)

A lot of libraries have e-books and therefore audiobooks as well available to download to your device. My mom lets us use her Audible account, and I end up listening to books just as much from the library as from Audible. There are also some text-to-speech programs if you have an e-book to plug into it... depending on the voice it's a bit weird, but I swear The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy was only improved by sounding like it was read by Stephen Hawking.
posted by lizbunny at 8:28 PM on January 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

I can't speak for all unrecorded books, but I imagine availability has something to do with the sales of audiobook rights, and the terms of the original book/publishing contract between author and publisher.

I was actually about to type what lizbunny said above. Public libraries are a fantastic free source of audiobooks that you may not find on Audible. You can go the e-route and download from the library's site (usually Overdrive) if it offers such a thing. Also, if you have a CD player or tape player, audiobooks in those formats are still a thing at public libraries. If your public library does not have a wide selection, you might ask if an interlibrary loan is possible--likely so only if the specific material exists and is housed somewhere on an ILL agreement.
posted by artful at 8:33 PM on January 19, 2015

Another website is Scribd. It's $10/month for as much as you can listen, though you don't own them. I don't have an issue with this, though, as I rarely want to listen to audiobooks more than once. The range is smaller than Audible's though, so my guess is that anything not on Audible won't be on Scribd.
posted by kjs4 at 10:30 PM on January 19, 2015

There's a website called LibriVox that is a collection of books in the public domain read by amateur readers. The quality varies quite a bit, but there are some good readers, and if you find someone you like, sometimes they've read a bunch of books.

Also, somewhat surprisingly, YouTube has a lot of audiobooks on it these days. Some are amateurs and LibriVox recordings, but some are copies of the professional recordings. And because of Google's new rules, they're not all split up into a hundred different videos. You can find online converters too that will convert a YouTube video to an mp3, if it's inconvenient for you to listen to YouTube.

And! If you have a recent version of iTunes, you can convert an mp3 music file into an audiobook file. Here's how: click on the song information (select the song and hit "command i" on my computer), go to "Options" and then change "Media type" from "Music" to "Audiobook."
posted by colfax at 11:42 PM on January 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

Another option to consider is the wealth of audio fiction podcasts out there. Just search for "Audio fiction" in the iTunes store. Though these usually aren't existing books by established authors, there are so many good ones that I sort'a switched to amateur audio fiction entirely. Especially for the creepier scifi and horror stories, you can't go wrong with things like Escape pod, Clarkesworld, Pseudopod, etc.
posted by hz37 at 12:41 AM on January 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Give Loyal Books a look. Over 7,000 free audio and eBooks. Might keep you busy for a while, and even offer titles you haven't thought of listening to.
posted by John Kennedy Toole Box at 3:37 AM on January 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Downpour sells many audio books for less than Audible, and they are all DRM-free (as an added bonus, Amazon is not involved, either).
posted by ryanshepard at 8:27 AM on January 20, 2015 [1 favorite]