Quote:
Originally Posted by sun surfer
I was leery of Audible Plus at first, but it's starting to look better than I was expecting.
|
Yeah, me too. At least for now.
It’s been so long since I’ve found value in any Audible promotion - sale books are always the same and not interesting and Audible Originals is just a lot of junk, AFAIC - that I wasn’t expecting much. But a cursory check of a few favorite narrators shows much I’d enjoy and in fact, a lot of books I’ve already listened to, and if that’s not the acid test, I don’t know what is.
But. I’ve got such a mammoth unlistened to library that I really can’t justify the standard membership. On the other hand, $8/month for Plus only (roughly two books a month, or $4 per?) doesn’t strike me as a bad deal at all. I’ve spent much more than that on books I’ve bought and very, very few of them will ever be relistened to. So the calculation becomes how much I need to spend each month to keep me in audiobooks and the answer is, nothing at all. Between what I own and OverDrive and Hoopla, I can go indefinitely. The occasional credits would be for books I really, really want to listen to and can’t find for free - and I’m pretty flexible at that. There’s always something I can find. In any case, it means Plus doesn’t satisfy a real need.
Sooner or later, I’ll rejoin Audible when a good deal I qualify for comes along, and I suppose the strategy would be to load up on Plus listens while a member, but that starts to seem joyless. Audiobooks are for love, not obligation. I also wonder to what extent Audible has made a lot of interesting books available up front to entice the punters, and what the Plus catalogue will be like down the line as books cycle out. After all, I used to buy sale books, but the selection these days is terrible for my purposes.
TL;DR - Audible has established a pattern of providing much less value for much more money and I’d be surprised if Plus didn’t turn out to be more of the same.