Audiobook Downloads and Rentals

Service Name/Rating:	Price:	Free Trial:	Terms:	Upgrade Plans:	Library Details:	Devices Supported:	Bottom Line:
Go to Site Read Full Review	$7.49/mo for 3 mos; $14.95/mo thereafter; $149.50/yr	1 free audiobook; 2 week trial	1 book per month* Free NYT or WSJ subscription	2 book plan for $22.95/mo; $229.50/yr	60,000+ audio programs including books, magazines, newspapers, radio	Multiple formats support most major media players: iPod, Zune, Kindle, BlackBerry, and more	Membership plan saves frequent readers money on the biggest download library in the audiobook business
Go to Site Read Full Review	$22.49/mo; $254.49/yr	2 weeks	Unlimited rentals, 1 title at a time	2-16 books at a time for $27.49/mo to $69.49/mo; also annual plans	26,000+ titles	CD player or CD-ROM drive	Fast, free shipping with the biggest rental library makes this a great service for frequent listeners
Go to Site Read Full Review	$9.99/mo; $95.99/yr	1 free audiobook; 2 week trial	1 book per month*	2 book plan for $18.99/mo; $179.99/yr;	8,000+ audiobooks	Any MP3-compatible device	Cheapest plans and good selection, though it may lack some high-profile titles; audio quality is not top-notch.
Service Name/Rating:	Price:	Free Trial:	Terms:	Upgrade Plans:	Library Details:	Devices Supported:	Bottom Line:
Go to Site Read Full Review	$14.95/mo; $156.00/yr (rental) or $17.98/mo; $180.00/yr (download)	15 days on $26.98/mo 2 book rental plan	1 book per month* download or unlimited rentals, 1 at a time	2 or 3 book plans for $24.95/mo to $37.98/mo; annual plans also available	11,000+ rental titles; 10,000+ download titles	Some rentals require MP3-CD player; not all downloads iPod compatible	Cheapest rental service has good quality audio, but too many formats creates confusion
Go to Site Read Full Review	Cost varies: $2.95-$49.95	None	One-time purchase and download	Same as other purchases	20,000+ download titles	iPod, iPhone, computers running iTunes software	Better for casual listeners; not as cheap as subscription services; must use iTunes/iPod/iPhone

*All subscription services offer download credits, with most titles requiring a single credit for purchase. Some titles may cost more.

Audible Review: Audiobook ServicesGo to Site | Back to Chart

Audible is the biggest name in audiobooks, which makes sense since they're owned by Amazon.com, the go-to source on the Internet for physical books. Audible is so big, in fact, that it provides the downloads to Apple's iTunes music store, which we also reviewed. Does Audible's subscription plan offer an advantage? It depends how much you like to listen.

Audible's monthly subscription plans start at $14.95 per month (with the first three months at $7.49). Like the other audiobook download services, it's a one-credit-per-month plan, with most books requiring a single credit for download. It seems that particularly popular titles with a "cover price" over $40.00, such as those from the Twilight, series take two credits. Curiously, there's no option to buy additional credits, but you can subscribe to a two-credit-per-month plan for $22.95. There's also a yearly plan that comes out to $12.46 per credit (or $149.50 per year), and you'll get all 12 credits up front. As an added bonus, all subscribers get a free daily audio subscription to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, roughly an hour of listening content per day. Titles can be purchased without a membership plan, but the price-per-title is generally higher (unless you're purchasing radio programs).

Content-wise, Audible is king. It boasts over 60,000 audio programs, 47,860 of which are audiobooks. The rest of their inventory is comprised of audio versions of newspapers and magazines, as well as TV and Radio content. The browsing, searching, and buying experience is top-notch. Books have a publisher's summary, user ratings and reviews when available. There are also generous audio samples for each title so you can decide if you like the book and the narrator.

Audible distributes its audio programs as proprietary AA (Audible Audio) files with DRM (Digital Rights Management) which limits each audiobook to three computers and three audio players. Audible supports a wide range of audio devices, and you'll tell Audible which one you use, so you get the right file type. You should check out Audible's Device Center to be sure it supports yours, but those from major manufacturers such as Apple, BlackBerry, Microsoft, Amazon, Philips, Samsung, and Sony are included.

There are four file-quality options for most devices, ranging from the AM-radio-quality Format 2, to the CD-quality Enhanced Format. If you have a slow Internet connection, you'll probably want the former, while the latter is meant for those who are bothered by highly compressed audio. You can use a compatible media player or the AudibleManager (a free download) to listen to your audiobooks, as well as to transfer them to a compatible device. One of Audible's best customer-friendly features is that once you buy a title, you can re-download it any time you want. If your hard drive ever crashes, or you delete the audiobook, Audible will let you get it back. This is a feature you won't find on iTunes.

The book we bought only cost us one credit, our full allotment for the monthly fee of $14.99. Audible's list price was $20.99, which is roughly the price of the equivalent 6-CD set on Amazon.com. Even at the non-introductory price of $14.99, we'd be saving money. We chose the highest-quality file for download. It's good to note that an hour-long radio program can cost $0.66 or 1 credit, so save those credits for books. You can always pay the program price for other content (which comes at a discount). Audible gives its subscribers 30% off the listed price for titles bought without credits.

Audible's sound quality was good on the audiobook we downloaded. Using fairly high-end headphones and our iTunes equalizers turned off, we found both voice and music to be perfectly listenable, but a bit flat and lacking in dynamics. To our ears, it did not sound as good as the same title did on CD. We are rather picky with audio though. Those who have no problem with run-of-the-mill MP3 files probably won't have any complaints.

Audible's help section is fully fleshed out and rather well put together, just like the rest of the site. Even though Audible is owned by Amazon.com, it has so far avoided that site's overload of distracting page elements. With Audible, you only see what you need.

Audible has been in the business since 1997, and has clearly spent a lot of time getting the business right. While it's not the cheapest plan, and we didn't think the audio was perfect, it does have the largest selection and best shopping experience of all the subscription services we looked at.

Booksfree Review: Audiobook ServicesGo to Site | Back to Chart

Booksfree may seem like a bit of an anachronism next to other download-based services we've looked at, but it's the same model that Netflix has been successfully using for movies. For a flat fee of $22.95 per month you can rent as many audiobooks as you want, though you can only have one out at a time (upgraded plans let you keep more). CDs offer a number of advantages over the higher-tech digital download: slow Internet connections can make downloading large audio files impractical and many people still prefer the uncompressed sound of the CD. Also, you don't have to worry about device compatibility with a standard audio CD. They're pretty universal.

Booksfree actually offers two different kinds of CD rentals (and therefore CD rental plans). Most titles are distributed as conventional audio CDs, playable on any CD player or computer CD-ROM drive. Some, however, are distributed as space-saving MP3-CDs. These MP3-CDs require a special MP3-compatible CD player or a computer with an MP3-compatible media player installed (which is most of them). There's an MP3-CD-only plan which will run you $13.49 per month, but the library is considerably smaller (only 5,700 audiobooks), and contains largely older titles.

Booksfree claims a library of over 20,000 titles (26,000 if you include the MP3-CDs). You'll find bestsellers like Twilight plus the latest Dan Brown books. Harry Potter is there too. The site is easy to search and navigate, though it's not the best looking. There's a nice feature for noting your favorite authors and having the system auto-add books by those authors. Booksfree also has a pretty active community in the book reviews and in the site's general forum. There are no audio samples, however, so you can't preview any of your titles before you order them.

Our experience with the rent-by-mail program was very positive. The titles ship via First Class mail; we ordered our title on a Wednesday and received our six-CD audiobook that very Saturday (with a holiday in between). Not bad, considering it shipped from their warehouse in Vienna, Virginia to our offices in San Francisco, California. The discs arrived in a compact, well-padded envelope that easily converts to a postage-paid return envelope.

Needless to say, the audio with a conventional CD is the best you'll get, outside of hearing the author reading the book live. It sounded better to us than any of the MP3s we listened to (though the downloads from Simply Audiobooks were rather good). For us, there was a noticeable difference between Audible's "CD-quality" sound and the actual CD. If you use expensive headphones or a nice stereo system, you'll want to consider these differences.

We had little to complain about with the MP3-CDs. The 128kbs sound files sounded very good playing from our computer's CD drive. It's a good option if you have car stereo that plays MP3-CDs; you'll be switching CDs around much less.

On the downside, Booksfree is the most expensive book rental plan we looked at. In fact, it's the most expensive subscription-based service we looked at. The book we rented would have cost us $20.99 on Amazon.com, or a single credit on a download service that would run between $9.99 and $14.95 (and you don't get to keep the book). However, if you go through more than one book per month, you'll start seeing savings over the download sites. Certainly part of what you're paying for is the fast First Class shipping. But you also get a selection twice as big as its closest competitor, Simply Audiobooks. Sure, the website could be better, but for those who prefer their books on CD, Booksfree is an avid listener's best friend.

eMusic Audiobooks Review: Audiobook ServicesGo to Site | Back to Chart

eMusic is primarily known for its subscription music-download service, but it also offers an audiobook subscription service. The cost is $9.99 per month, the cheapest service we reviewed, and can be purchased alone or with one of their $11.99-per-month music subscription plans. You get your first two weeks free, a trial period that includes one audiobook credit, which will pretty much get you any title (though a small number of titles cost two credits).

The library is considerably smaller than Audible's. At 8,307 titles it pales next to the latter's 47,860 audiobooks (not to mention the newspaper and magazine titles). Still, it has a number of popular titles including those by bestselling authors Dan Brown, Gregory Maguire, Cormac McCarthy, Douglas Adams, John Hodgman, Patricia Cornwell, Steven King, James Patterson, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama. Noticeably absent are J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books as well as the popular teen blood-sucker, Twilight.

The eMusic store is well organized and easy to use. Each title has a generous, high-quality audio sample and you'll usually find a bit of description too. There's also a spot for user reviews, but it's a smaller community, so don't expect a lot of those. Downloads are processed through the eMusic Download Manager. We tested it on a Mac and it worked quite well, handily plopping our downloads into iTunes.

Here's where we start talking about the difference between eMusic and just about everyone else. Most other download services use DRM (Digital Rights Management) to limit the number of times you can sync and burn your audiobooks. With eMusic you're using regular MP3 files without any DRM. This means much greater freedom since you're not using a proprietary format. It also means they play on any device than can play MP3 files. There's no need to check a compatibility chart.

eMusic does other things differently too: books are downloaded as multiple files (you still pay per title, and not per file). Also, since the MP3s are not auto-categorized in iTunes as audiobooks; you will have to set their media type from "music" to "audiobooks" if you want them grouped together in your iTunes library. So, while you gain considerable freedom, it may require a bit more work.

How do the files sound? You don't get a choice of audio quality with eMusic. The 64kbps format does not provide flawless sound quality. For comparison's sake, a song downloaded from iTunes is sampled at 256kbps (which means much less loss of detail). Of course music is generally more sonically complex than an audiobook. We used fairly high-end headphones with our iTunes equalizer turned off for our comparison test. We found eMusic's audiobook quality to have a slightly compressed sound, particularly during sections that incorporated music. The narrator's voice was also a bit flat sounding. It wasn't terrible, and some users may not notice. We have pretty sensitive ears when it comes to sound quality, but we would rank it below Audible's Enhanced audio format, and definitely below true CD quality.

eMusic certainly is the bargain leader in this space. $9.99 is an excellent price for an audiobook. eMusic, unlike Audible, does not let you roll over unused credits, but you can purchase additional credits for $11.99 (or you can upgrade to a higher credit plan). One caveat: eMusic does not warn you if you want to spend beyond your limit, so be careful with the "download" button. If you've used up your credits eMusic will purchase another one for you. All-in-all it's a good service, particularly for those who like their audiobooks without digital rights management. With a two-week free trial that automatically gives you one free audiobook, there's no reason not to try it.

Simply Audiobooks Review: Audiobook ServicesGo to Site | Back to Chart

We've reviewed rent-by-mail audiobook services and audiobook download services. Simply Audiobooks is the only service we reviewed that does both. It should mean freedom of choice, but users must decide which plan they'd like, rental or download. Downloading is cheaper, at $14.95 per month ($13.00 per month on an annual plan). Rent-by-mail is $17.95 per month ($15.00 per month on an annual plan). The service has over 10,280 titles for download and over 10,000 available for rent-by-mail. The rent-by-mail catalog is smaller than its closest competitor's, Booksfree.com, but it's also $5.00 cheaper. As for downloads, its catalog dwarfs eMusic's, but can't come close to Audible's.

As for the selection, it really varies based on format. The CD-rental stock is larger and much more current than the purchasable download library: Harry Potter is there, as is Twilight. You'll also find Dan Brown (some titles as rentals, others for purchase) and Sarah Palin, whose Going Rogue demonstrates true bipartisanship by being available for rental and download. They stock far fewer versions of classics, so you'll have to like the one Moby Dick narrator they offer. On the other hand, if you want to know Who Moved My Cheese you're in luck. You can rent it or download it, depending on your plan.

Simply Audiobooks started their business using the Netflix model, and has only recently moved into the download model. This may explain why there's something disjointed about the latter. Some of the audiobooks are in the WMA (Windows Media) format. While WMA files play in many media players such as those made by Sony, Creative, Sansa, and Zen, they do not play on the iPod or iPhone. Simply Audiobooks also offers some of its titles in an "iPod compatible" MP3 format. The files are not immediately iPod compatible, however. They come in a compressed WMD package which must either be decompressed by Windows Media Player (if you're a on a PC) or changed to a ZIP file and decompressed (on a Mac). Once that's done, they can be imported into iTunes and synced to an iPod. It's a bit more laborious than with other services.

All that aside, we found the MP3 files to be pretty great sounding. They sounded much more alive than the same title from Audible, eMusic, and iTunes did. This is because it uses a less "lossy" compression. Better quality comes at a storage cost, however. The files are twice as big. Our 7-hour book took up nearly 400MB.

Simply Audiobooks gets the web interface mostly right, and it's pretty easy to search through and find what you're looking for. There are summaries and user reviews. Unfortunately, many titles lacked audio samples. If you're going to spend 7 hours listening to a narrator, it's nice to know if you're going to enjoy listening to the voice.

It took almost exactly a week for our title to ship from Las Vegas, Nevada to our office in San Francisco, California (with one holiday day in between). The Standard Mail service isn't as speedy as Booksfree's First Class, but not bad either, though it depends on your proximity to the shipping center. The discs come in a small box that easily converts for return shipping. The discs showed the marks of having been played, but nothing that looked bad enough to spoil playback. CD quality is the best you'll get, at least compared to the download services we tried. The great thing about CDs is that you don't have to worry about device compatibility; they play in CD players and CD-ROM drives. Of course the big disadvantage is that you don't own the audiobook. While there's no due date, you will have to send back the discs to get a new title.

Sadly, Simply Audiobooks could be a lot simpler. A single plan that allowed both rentals and downloads would have been a real boon to customers. Splitting the titles up among two different plans, and three different formats (one of which that's incompatible with the iPod), is just confusing. While you have the option to search for one format or the other, it feels needlessly complicated.

So, should you choose Simply Audiobooks? It depends on your needs and your budget. It's the cheapest rent-by-mail service, though its selection is smaller than its closest competitor. While it's not the cheapest download service (that title belongs to eMusic), its audio files have the best sound quality. Probably the biggest questions for most users will be whether Simply Audiobooks has the titles they need, in a format they can use. If so, it's not a bad option.

iTunes Review: Audiobook ServicesGo to Site | Back to Chart

Apple's iTunes music store is the other big behemoth in the Audiobook space. It actually gets its files from Audible, though it does not have all of latter's titles. While it's hard to calculate the number of titles iTunes stocks, 20,000 is one number floating around on the web. The selection is sizable and contains a number of popular titles from the likes of J.K. Rowling, Stephanie Meyer, Michael Crichton, and Alice Sebold. Unlike the other services we reviewed, iTunes does not offer a subscription-based service. It offers a pure à la carte service.

It's therefore suited to the more casual reader, the individual who doesn't think they'll go through a book a month. Since audiobooks are purchased on a per-title basis, the prices range rather widely. While some titles definitely come in at a cheaper price than a monthly subscription fee (i.e. some classics go for $6.99 or less, while a subscription plan can cost $24.95 per month), most popular titles are considerably more, making the subscription plans cheaper. The exception is with some titles, such as those in the Twilight series, that cost two credits from the likes of Audible; here the cost is about the same.

iTunes audiobooks are different in another way: the format. iTunes audiobooks come in one file type: the AAC (Apple Audio Codec) format. The first thing to know about this format is that it's only compatible with Apple audio devices (iPod and iPhone) and computers running iTunes (Mac or Windows). If there's no "i" in your digital audio player, and you don't want there to be, you'll have to look elsewhere. The other thing to know is that the files have built-in DRM (Digital Rights Management) that ensures that you only play the audiobook on five authorized computers at a time. This won't be a problem for most users as long as they don't plan on giving titles out to their entire audiobook club.

Here's something else about the AAC format, and it's good news: the audio quality is pretty good. Not surprisingly it's indistinguishable from the files we downloaded from Audible. Still, it's not exactly CD-quality and sensitive ears may note some flatness or harshness. We're a bit picky about audio, but realize that many users will not pick up any differences.

If you've used the iTunes store to shop for music, movies, or apps, you'll have a pretty good idea what to expect from the audiobook section. There's a fair amount of editorial content, as well as audio previews. You'll also find user reviews for many titles, as well as recommended reads. Like other audiobook services, the iTunes store offers the occasional free audiobook. Unlike others we've seen, you will occasionally find free chapters offered.

Is iTunes a bargain? Not if you're a voracious reader-listener. Occasional readers who live through their iPods and iPhones will get the most out of the iTunes store. While many audiobooks on the iTunes music store are cheaper than their CD counterparts on Amazon.com, they're generally not cheaper than the same title purchased through Audible, Simply Audiobooks, or eMusic subscription services.