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Amazon Adds Audiobooks and Podcasts To Prime Membership (fortune.com)
If you're one of the 63 million Amazon Prime members out there, you may be happy to hear that Amazon will now grant you unlimited access to podcasts and audiobooks from Audible. Fortune reports: With Tuesday's news, Prime members will now be able to stream a rotating selection of more than 50 audiobooks. Prime members will also have free access to Amazon's newly launched on-demand audio service from Audible Channels, which provides ad-free podcasts and other audio content. Audible released the service in July, and is charging non-Prime members $4.95 each month to access the selection of podcasts. In addition to podcasts, Channels also includes access to audio versions of articles from major publications, comedy shows, short fiction, and more. Fingers crossed they have some engaging technology books in their rotating selection...
A major discovery for those unfamiliar with search engines and RSS readers.
The article says"Prime members will now able to stream a rotating selection of more than 50 audiobooks." and proceeds to self-link to another prime fortune article . That's a blog spam trick and terrible reporting. As a prime member, I want to know what is available and how to stream it?
I love these audiobooks. I have some eclectic tastes - mostly secondary works on antiquity and medieval times, with an occasional divergence into the Napoleonic Era. Luckily, the books I like are long and if well written, engaging. I can rip them to my iPod and listen on my iphone or computer, and I take advantage of all these modes. The selection is not incredible in my particular area of interest, but I have a backlog of things to listen to.
Protip: copy to computer, convert to mp3, chop into 10 minute segments with sequential numbers and you can easily transit between listening methodologies without worrying about being online. The file number is a useful way to sync between streaming and listening to files. This and a pair of Bose noise cancelling phones make plane rides very pleasant.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
unlimited access to podcasts and audiobooks from Audible
Did you flunk Reading Comprehension 101, or do you just take delight in abusing fellow human beings?
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
In what way is a "rotating selection of 50 audiobooks" unlimited? Not only are Prime members limited to the 50 titles Amazon puts in rotation, they're limited in how much time they have to read the books! Limits, limits, everywhere! As with their "free" Prime movies, Amazon manages to make another utterly useless "free" offering -- that costs $99/year.
That's a pretty limited subset of the thousands of books at Audible.
So it's more of a teaser (that happens to rotate every month). Just like Prime Video - where they make it difficult for you to search for free video, and try to sell you to buy the non-free Amazon video.
Cross-promotion within the company's product suites? Wake me up when they get serious.
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I wish you (and Amazon) would stop calling it free. It's not free, it's flat-rate. That rate is $99/year, equal to the price of quite a few orders of 2-day shipping.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
This sounds like it'll be the same as the Kindle lending library for Amazon Prime members (you can get a book for a month, one per month, one at a time). The problem is the selection. It's no good if you want to read something specific.
Same with the video for that matter. OK, you might, if you're lucky, find a film showing for free on Prime that you want to watch but most stuff still costs on top of the Prime membership and it isn't even any cheaper than getting it elsewhere.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
A lot of public libraries offer free audio-book programs (TBH, haven't used them. I can't concentrate on things long enough to get anything from an audio book). For example, the Los Angeles public library has deals with OverDrive, OneClickDigital, and Hoola.
Again, I can't vouch for whether their new releases or even good books, but the programs are there.
Bark less. Wag more.