Unlimited audiobooks: what the word actually buys

The word is doing a lot of work in this category. Search for unlimited audiobooks and you will find several services happy to be described that way, and not one of them lets you listen to whatever you like as often as you like. What they actually offer are four different kinds of limit, and it is worth knowing which one you are buying.

The four kinds of limit

A credit. One title a month from the whole store, yours to keep. This is Audible's Premium Plus model, and the keeping part is the bit no other model offers.

An included catalog. Listen to as much as you like from a defined pool while you are a member. This is the part of a membership that behaves like unlimited listening, and the reason it is not is that the pool is not the store — included versus credit titles is the distinction people most often miss when they subscribe.

An allowance of hours. Spotify's model, and the most honest labeling of the group. Its own page states “15 hours of audiobook listening time on Premium, every month”, from a subscriber catalog it puts at “over 700,000 audiobook titles”, and adds that unused listening hours “expire at the end of each month and do not carry over”. If you go over, Spotify says you can buy a top-up “in increments of 10 hours”.

A borrow allowance. The library model. hoopla's help pages state the monthly limit “is set by your local library”, resets on the first of the month, and that unused borrows “will not roll over”. Libby uses copies and holds instead, so the limit is time rather than count.

What a month actually gets you

Fifteen hours deserves a sentence of translation, because it is the number people misjudge most. An average adult audiobook runs somewhere around ten to twelve hours, so Spotify's allowance is one book and part of another — not a month of listening for anyone who listens daily. The full comparison is on Audible versus Spotify.

So which is closest?

For unmetered listening, a membership catalog. Audible's included pool is listened to freely while you are a member, which is the closest any paid service comes to the promise — with the important caveat that it is a pool, not the store, and the book you specifically want may sit outside it and need the credit.

For quantity of specific titles you choose, the library. A hoopla allowance of eight plus a Libby card is more books a month than any paid subscription hands you, for nothing, with the trade-off being waiting and catalog gaps.

For keeping what you get, only the credit model. Audible states that titles bought with a credit are yours to keep forever — everything else on this page is access that ends when you stop paying, which is the point people find out about on what happens to your books when you cancel.

Choosing on the honest version

Work out how many hours you actually listen in a month. Not the aspirational figure — the real one, from the last four weeks. Ten hours is covered by Spotify if you already pay for it, or by your library for nothing. Forty hours needs a catalog you can listen to freely, and that is where a membership earns its fee.

Then check the arithmetic rather than the marketing: whether Audible is worth it runs it against the verified terms and comes out negative for a fair number of people. And if what you want is trials rather than a subscription, audiobook free trials compared covers what each company will actually give a new customer.