Steve Dotto here and I can say without hesitation I love audio books, loved them for many, many
years.
They’ve changed my life.
I listen to audio books constantly as I’m driving around the province.
I go on long road trips, on fishing trips I used to do with my sons so we listen to
books for years, audio books on tape.
Once they became available in MP3 format and on my MP3 player, I converted over to that
very quickly.
So over the years, I have listened to literally hundreds of hours of audio books.
I am a big fan.
Now there is one website which has really dominated the audio book market and that is
Audible.com.
They have probably more titles than anybody.
There are other options for getting your audio books.
Certainly, Apple’s own iTunes store is a good place to go but Audible is really the
one that all the others are measured against so I thought we’d take a little bit of a
tour on creating an Audible account and how you get those audio books into your devices
and use them.
A worthwhile exercise, don’t you think?
So let’s go and visit Audible.com now.
Usually, they’ve got different offers for signing up for a new account with Audible
available to you.
In this particular case, they don’t have too great an offer to us now.
It’s basically they’re selling the new memberships for about half-price for the first
three months.
Sometimes, you can get three months free.
Sometimes, you can get extra credits for free books.
You can also find different coupon codes occasionally that will get you some little extra pieces
here and there.
But for now, this is the offer that’s available and that’s the one that I’m going to show
you: three months at half price.
Now they do ask you for your credit card when you sign up.
That’s a stop for a lot of people but bottom line is they’re going to have to get paid
so your credit card is the best way for them to collect their money.
Once you’ve created your account, they charge your credit card for your initial month’s
fee and you’re given a credit for your very first audio book to download.
Now basically the credits work one credit per audio book.
I think for some of the really audio books and some ones that may be more expensive out
of the gate, they’ll charge you extra credits as you go along.
I haven’t noticed any of that or more than one credit.
So basically it’s one credit per book.
That's usually at a fairly substantial discount over if you just went online and purchased
the book directly.
They can be $29, $39, $49, $59 or even more to but an audio book so in this particular
case because I get one credit per month with the type of account that I have, I can purchase
one new book per month almost regardless of what it’s cost is.
Now if you haven’t decided already what book you want, this is a good time for you
to start browsing through the library and Audible has literally thousands of audio book
titles.
Now one thing that you’ll start to develop a taste for you as you download a few audio
books is you’ll get a flavor for the quality and the performance of the different narrators
and the quality does differ.
Different narrators for different books actually end up with fan groups with people following
them and people will buy books that they might not be as interested in because the performance
is so exceptional from one narrator or another.
Now I finally found a book here that I might be interested in, Riptide.
I like that author, Douglas Preston.
It’s not that he’s the best author in the world.
It’s just this type of content is great for me because I can listen to it for a few
minutes of it as I’m driving and not worry about if I have to stop and pick it up again
a little bit later.
It’s nice, light fare for the sort of listening that I do, either walking the dog or driving
around.
So I’ve decided this is the one I want to purchase.
I go through basically a shopping cart process where I use my available credits and purchase
this book.
Once I say I’m going to buy it, I’m very excited, now I then will confirm.
And as soon as I’ve confirmed my purchase, a download process starts to download the
book to my computer.
Now I’ve got the ability to access any of the books I’ve purchased at any time within
the library within Audible.
If we all look at this, as we go to my library, look!
They’ve given me a bonus.
I can buy one book, basically one credit for $4.95.
They’re always offering sales trying to get you to purchase a little bit more.
I’m happy with just the one book.
It’s going to take me long enough to listen to that.
So now here’s my library, you can see that it looks like I have two books.
Actually, it’s one book split into two different parts and they’re available to me.
So even if I switch devices and move to a different device or a different computer,
I can go back online into Audible at any point and re-download the books that I have so I
don’t have to store them all locally.
They’re all stored in the Cloud for me as well I can have them, of course, locally.
It will take a little to download depending on the speed of your internet connection but
for the most part with high speed internet, just a few minutes to download.
And here we can give some thought to some of the different settings within Audible.
One of them is format.
Don’t worry too much about it.
Most of us are going to be the standard format which is format #4 which is MP3.
The quality of the narration in MP3 format is just fine.
You can download larger files now with higher quality and higher fidelity but that’s really
more important in music, I think, then in spoken word.
It doesn’t make that much difference.
I don’t notice it.
Once I’ve downloaded the book, now it’s time to figure out how to listen to the book
and you’re going to want to use your music management program for that.
For most of us, that means iTunes so I’m going to open my iTunes.
As you can see, I’ve got lots of different books that I’ve downloaded over the years
within iTunes.
As I said, I’ve been listening to audio books for many, many years, buying them from
a variety of different sources.
Once I’ve gone into my books within iTunes, I now want to import this new book into my
library.
It’s not a difficult process.
I just have to find it, it’s in My Downloads folder, but now Audible is asking for verification
that I am who I am.
This is the copyright protection basically for the book so I actually have to go through
two stages of authentication.
The first is authenticate that I’m an Audible user and then tell iTunes that I’m the authorized
user of this computer so that it can be downloaded.
Once I’ve done that, I search through my massive library and there it is, my new book
right there in the middle.
Got it.
Now I’ve got my new book in my iTunes library on my computer.
Next stage is I need to get it on whatever device I want to listen to it on.
I can certainly listen to on my computer if I choose to but I really want to have it on
my iPod or my iPad or my iPhone, one of my MP3 players that I can play it with.
In this particular case, I think I’ll stick it on my iPad so I can show you that process.
Now I did discover one slight problem when I first loaded it onto my iPad.
Now you might or might not have this issue and that was my iPad in my book carrier was
only configured to look at text-based books, ones that are in PDF or ePUB format.
So I had to actually go into my music within my iPad, tell it that I wanted to sync audio
books and as soon as I did that, once I went over into my book section, there was the ability
to sync audio books.
Now I can go through all the different audio books on my device and I can choose the exact
book that I wanted to download.
I can download any of my books but of course I want to download the newest.
This process will be very similar on your iPhone or your iPad.
Once you’ve got it down and done it once, it won’t be a problem to do it again in
the future.
Once you’ve done that, you simply sync your device and the new data is moved over onto
the iPad.
So now what I want to do is actually go onto my iPad and look at how I listen to the music.
All I do then is I go to my music player.
If I can’t see it right away, I choose audio books for my source and from there, I see
the audio book available for me to start listening.
Now the beauty of listening to audio books within this format is as you listen to them,
every time you stop, it creates an automatic bookmark for you so you pick up in the same
exact spot in your audio book next time.
You can listen to it on multiple devices should you choose.
It gives you a lot of flexibility and a lot of control over listening to your books.
As you can tell, I am a big fan of the audio book world and Audible.com has done a great
job of providing one clearinghouse that has more audio titles than any other.
There are other places you can go, other sites that you can download from but Audible is
a great starting point.
I’m Steve Dotto.
I hope you found this useful today.