50% off your first audiobook at Google Play

While surfing around on Google Play, I saw a giant banner that says get 50% off your first audiobook purchase through Google Play! The giant banner points to an audiobook url, which, as of the time of writing, is not ready yet. It’s possible that the banner went live before the audiobooks page got fully setup, so this serves as a heads up ~ if nothing else.

This looks like it would be a formal audiobook store, similar to iTunes and Audible. Google Play has been selling a small number of audiobooks under the Music store. These were mp3-audiobooks. I do not know if the new proper audiobooks will also be mp3, or will be some kind of a DRM format to please the publishers.

January 19, 2018 Filed Under: media Tagged With: ,

1-Year Prepaid Audible Subscription for $100

If you love audiobooks and the way Audible runs their service, you are in luck! Good until 10/25/17, Amazon is offering a prepaid 1-year Audible subscription for $100 as a one-time payment as part of their Kindle 10-Year Anniversary sale. This gets you 12 audiobook credits. This makes it $8.33 per audiobook.

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October 23, 2017 Filed Under: media Tagged With: ,

MP3 Audiobook: “No Time to Lose” by Pema Chordon for $9.49

If you prefer to get audiobooks in DRM-free mp3 format (instead of the DRM of Audible), you can get the audiobook “No Time To Lose” by Pema Chordon for just $9.49 on Google Play. This runs over 12 hours long. The mp3 files are organized in audio CD format, each audio CD is transferred to a single mp3 file, so you get 11 hourlong+ (on average) mp3 files.

This is not narrated by Pema Chodron, but by a Better Listen narrator. It is a reading of this ebook which averages 4.6 out of 5 based on nearly 80 customer reviews at Amazon.

Unless you have free Audible credits, this is a very very good price for the audiobook!

October 15, 2017 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , ,

FREE Upstanders on Audible and Prime Video

If you like listening to or watching inspirational stories, Season 2 of the Starbucks commissioned “Upstanders” series is now out! You can watch it in various ways online, but they also have an audiobook version of this series, you can get both season 1 and 2 for FREE as Audible audiobooks. All you need is an Audible/Amazon account, you don’t need a paying Audible membership.

If you prefer to watch this as a long-form documentary, and if you are a Prime member, Season 2 is available to watch for FREE through Prime Video

October 10, 2017 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , , ,

1-Year Prepaid Kindle Unlimited subscription for $89

Reading is good, and if you like to read a lot and take chances on authors or genres you haven’t read or heard of before, a Kindle Unlimited subscription may be a good idea, sort of like a Netflix-style service for e-books. For a limited time during the holiday shopping season (they don’t specify an expiration date), you can get a prepaid 1-Year Kindle Unlimited Subscription for $88. You pay $88 right now, and for that, you get 12 months of membership. It comes out to just under $7.50 per month. The month-to-month price is $10.

You can see which ebooks are eligible when you search around the Amazon website, they have the “Kindle Unlimited” signs next to them. The service now also includes select audiobooks (a subset of the ebooks available for Kindle Unlimited) along with a monthly selection of digital magazine issues (they change on a monthly basis).

You don’t get to keep any of the above, but you can read/listen as long as you are a paying subscriber.

PS: I am not sure how this works in conjunction with Prime Reading as I haven’t had both subscriptions live at the same time. “Prime Reading” is essentially a mini-me version of Kindle Unlimited, available for FREE for Prime members. “Prime Reading” only has 1000 ebooks, while “Kindle unlimited” has over 1 million ebooks.

PS2: Kindle Unlimited (KU) kinda makes it very hard to use the older “Kindle Lending Library” (KLL), which still continues. You’d have to use a Kindle hardware device for the KLL, and you don’t see the kLL option if a book is available through KU, so the only way to get your KLL item is to find something that is in KLL but not in KU. Impossible task on an e-reader, but more doable if you have time to spend on a Fire tablet or the Fire Phone 🙂

December 9, 2016 Filed Under: ereaders Tagged With: ,

Free Audiobook (pre-order): Scalzi’s The Dispatcher

If it’s free, I’ll take three they say, but in this case, you can only get one. For a limited time only, Audible is offering free pre-orders (in other words you pay $0.00) for the audiobook of John Scalzi’s The Dispatcher. This will be narrated by New-Trek’s Spock (Zachary Quinto). It is an unabridged edition and will come out on October 4 in 2016.

Screenshot below:

the_dispatched_scalzi_audible

This is yet another production at Amazon’s Audible studios, which is probably why they are able to give it away for free, as part of their renewed attempt to get every single person in the universe to sign up for their services 🙂

September 13, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , ,

[DEAD] Prime Members Only: $10 Amazon Credit and 3-Month Audible Trial for FREE

Stingy Amazon 🙂 As of 7/8/16, the free $10 Amazon credit part of the promotion expired. The free 3-month Audible trial for Prime members who’ve never done this promotion before continues…

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July 7, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , ,

YMMV: Audible Cancellation Offers: The Light Listener Plan

So I was on an Audible membership plan that was about to expire. I didn’t need any additional audiobooks, and nothing new is on the horizon for me, so I used their website to cancel the service. Before I was able to cancel, their system offered me two separate offers.

First up, was an offer to continue for an additional three months at half price of the regular monthly fee. Screenshot below:

audible_cancellation_plan

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February 1, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With:

Prime Members may qualify for a FREE 3-month Audible membership

Are you a Prime member? Do you have an inactive Audible membership? If so, you may qualify for a FREE 3-month Audible trial membership. Head on to the this promotional page, while logged on to your Amazon account, and the system will tell you whether you are eligible for this promotion.

It turns out I was eligible (Prime member, I used to have an Audible membership a couple of years ago), so now with one click, I’m in on a new 3-month free trial. After that ends, I will be charged $15/month until or unless I cancel it. This is the “Welcome page”.

audible1

Then I proceed onwards to my Audible account and this is how this free trial is shown:

audible2

So the benefits of this are two-fold. You get three free audiobooks (one per month), but you can also purchase any Audible title at a 30% off discount of the shown prices.

November 3, 2015 Filed Under: shopping Tagged With:

Audiobook (mp3s on CD): Rothfuss Wise Man’s Fear for under $9

Patrick Rothfuss’s “The Wise Man’s Fear” is a long book, almost 1000 pages (993 per the product description). It is the second book in his popular “Kingkiller Chronicles” fantasy series. If you don’t feel like reading the book, and don’t like the restrictions of Audible, he and his publisher offer an additional option, an MP3-CD version of the audiobook. This is all legit, sold by Amazon.com actual, on sale for under $9. You get a CD with mp3 files, this is not stacks and stacks of audio CDs! [free 2-day shipping for Prime members]

NOTE: some of the earlier reviews mentioned that some chapters were missing from some MP3-CDs. So keep an eye out for that.

September 20, 2015 Filed Under: shopping Tagged With: ,