I’ve been an Audible subscriber for 9 years, although I bought my first audiobook from Audible even before that.   For a double sawbuck each month I get two books of any length — an incredible deal.

Plus all the books have reviews by real listeners.  Yeah that’s standard stuff now, but back then it was pretty cool.  It’s the best way to decide your next read.

The Audible format plays all on the major MP3 players.  I always have an MP3 player with me, and so I can grab a few minutes of my book anywhere: exercising, driving to work, mowing the lawn, standing in lines, sitting on the throne.

Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with my two books per month.  If I get behind, I buy shorter books until I get caught up.  The voice performances are usually terrific, and lately we’ve been hearing big-name actors like Tim Curry and Whoopi Goldberg.

An aside to any narrators who may be reading this: some of you are great with voices, making a unique voice for every character, and some aren’t.  If you aren’t good with voices, don’t bother.  You can still be a great narrator without them.  A pleasant and clear voice is far more important.  You will certainly lose readers if you do voices poorly.

Anyway, I guess my Audible plan is $23 per month now, but I got grandfathered in for the original $20.  Still an incredible deal, considering one audiobook from the bookstore is twice that, or more.  Plus they are CDs.  Pfft.  Old technology.

I’ve had various MP3 players over the years.  I resisted becoming an iSheep for as long as possible, but a couple of years ago I decided to claw back some pocket space.  I retired my Zen MP3 player and Nokia cell phone and got an iPhone.

iPhone and iOS are a great piece of kit, but I HATE iTunes… a subject for a future rant.

I used the built in Apple Music player for years until I found Audible had an app.  When did that happen?

The Audible app is so much better than Apple’s built in Music app.  It has some handy features such as speedup/down, sleep timer, and bookmarking.  It even integrates with Bluetooth headsets so if you tap your play button it will resume where you left off, just like with the Music app.

FYI the Bluetooth button trick works with the Music app too.  So how, you are about to ask, does iOS know which app to use when you tap your play button?  Audible or Music?  It seems to go by the one you used most recently.  Or sometimes it gets confused and does Music.

Another nice thing about the Audible app — you can download audiobooks without connecting to your computer!  It will come in over wifi.  Not 3G or 4G though, it times out (too big).

All is not rosy, though.  I’ve been using the app for a couple of months now, and I did run into a couple of annoying problems.  Well actually, it was the same annoying problem twice.

I lost all my downloaded books and had to re-download them.  Once was when Audible “encouraged” me to merge my Audible account with my Amazon account.  The second time was after an app upgrade.  Both times I was near wifi and was able to re-download without too much trouble.

At least, I hope those events were what caused it.  Maybe it was coincidence and it could happen at any time.  What if I have no wifi?  I would be without an audiobook!  The Horror!

Anyone else have problems with the Audible app?