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Love to Read But Short on Time? 11 Places to Find Cheap Audiobooks
The convenience and portability of audiobooks let you enjoy your love of reading on the go. But how do you find the cheap audiobooks you actually want?
There are a number of audiobook services available, but the options can be overwhelming. Finding the right audiobook service is a matter of finding the best one for how you like to read. In this post, we’ll compare 11 places where you can find cheap audiobooks.
An audiobook subscription can open doors to new authors, genres and books you may have never discovered. But does it fit in your budget? If you need some extra cash to fund your audiobook subscriptions, here are some of our favorite ways to make easy money.
Here’s our rundown of some of the best audiobook services where you can grab a book for your ears.
Audible is a big name in audiobooks. As a part of Amazon, it’s heavily marketed and easily available, but it has its pros and cons.
Audiobooks.com is another subscription service, much like Audible.
Scribd is a subscription service that allows you to access “unlimited” audiobooks and also offers features like ebooks, podcasts and even sheet music.
For $12.99, subscription service Downpour gives you one credit (good for any one book) per month. You can spend them as you go or save them up. Or you can simply rent or buy books without a subscription, but you’ll pay a little more for each title.
Chirp is a sister site of Bookbub, an ebook site. When you sign up for the service, you get a daily email featuring special deals. Many of the deals are $5 or less for each book.
Apple Books is a store for Apple users to purchase audiobooks. It’s not a subscription site, just a pay-for-what-you-want store.
Google Play Books is much like Apple Books, but for Android and PC users, and with a few more perks.
Libro.fm is the independent bookstore of audiobook services — the anti-Audible if you will.
Blinkist is a unique service in that it offers condensed versions of popular nonfiction books for people who don’t feel like they have time to listen to entire books.
The LibriVox audiobooks website declares “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain.” So what does that mean? Basically, it’s a free library of audiobooks that are old enough to have outlasted their copyright. They are read by volunteers.
To find free audiobooks, you can always go to your local library and check out audiobooks on CD, but that’s so 2005. These days most library systems are hooked up with apps like OverDrive, Libby or Hoopla so you can check out audiobooks digitally on your phone, tablet or reader.
Tyler Omoth is a contributor to The Penny Hoarder. Robert Bruce, a senior writer with The Penny Hoarder, also worked on this story.
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