Where to listen: the audiobook apps compared

The question “which audiobook app is best” has no answer, because the apps are not competing for the same job. Two of them lend you books your library already paid for. One sells you books outright. One rents you a catalog. One caps you at a number of hours. What you want is the combination that covers your year for the least money, and for most people that is two apps rather than one.

The free ones first

Libby is the app most US public libraries use. Its own help page states: “With Libby, you can borrow and enjoy free ebooks, digital audiobooks, and magazines from your library. All you need is a library card.” It also notes that “by default, all book and audiobook loans are downloaded for offline use when you have a Wi-Fi connection”, which is what makes it usable on a plane or a subway.

Libby works on the same principle as a physical library: the library licenses a number of copies and you queue when they are out. That is the whole trade-off in one sentence — excellent catalog, real waiting. How to borrow from your library covers the setup and the trick of joining more than one library system, which shortens most queues considerably.

hoopla is the other library app, offered by a smaller number of systems and worth checking for specifically. Its own site describes borrowing “audiobooks, eBooks, comics, movies, TV, magazines, or music” and says “all you need is a library card”. The model is different from Libby's: hoopla's help pages state that the monthly borrow limit “is set by your local library”, resets at the start of each calendar month, and that unused borrows “will not roll over into the next month”. Most audiobook loans run 21 days. The full comparison is on Audible versus hoopla.

LibriVox covers the public domain. Volunteers read out-of-copyright books and give the recordings away — its own site describes them as “free for anyone to listen to” and states that all its audio is in the public domain. Quality varies by reader, which is reasonable for free.

The paid ones, and what each is actually for

Audible is the largest and the one most people mean by an audiobook app. Its own App Store listing describes the feature set that matters when you are away from a signal — “Offline listening — download and listen anywhere, no wifi needed” — and the membership is a monthly credit plus a catalog you can listen to while you are a member. The credit part matters because a title bought with a credit stays yours after you cancel, which nothing else on this page does. How Audible credits work is the mechanism, and where you can actually listen is the device coverage.

The Kindle app is worth mentioning here because some Kindle Unlimited titles include narration. Amazon's own Kindle app listing states that “Kindle Unlimited and Amazon Prime members can select and download Kindle books directly in the app”, and Amazon's help page says to find narrated titles by looking for the “with Narration” headset icon. It is a subset rather than a parallel audiobook catalog — audiobooks on Kindle Unlimited sets out the limits.

Spotify is the one people are surprised by, because they are frequently already paying for it. Spotify's 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 hours “expire at the end of each month and do not carry over”. Fifteen hours is roughly one to one and a half average-length audiobooks. If you already pay for Premium, that is listening you have already bought — check it before adding anything. Audible versus Spotify runs the comparison properly.

YouTube, briefly

It belongs on the list because so many people start there, and it comes with two structural problems: much of what is posted is an uploaded copy that eventually disappears, and YouTube's own benefits page states that background play requires a Premium membership — so on the free tier, locking your phone stops the audio. Audiobooks on YouTube covers what is legitimately there and what is not.

The combination most people should actually run

A library app plus one paid app. The library covers everything you are relaxed about and costs nothing; the paid app covers the titles you want immediately and the ones the library never licensed. Run that way, a paid membership stops competing with free options it cannot beat and starts doing the one job free options cannot do.

The order matters too. Set up the library app first, live with it for a month, and see what it actually failed to give you. That list — the real one, not the imagined one — is the only honest input to the question on whether Audible is worth it.