Who owns the most legally purchased audiobooks?

@Jasonf1984 I have about the same number but don’t see buying as many in the future because they increased the Audible match price for owned Kindle books. It was good while it lasted.

@venussuz what I read and what I listen to are usually totally different things, surprisingly, I buy books and audio completely separate it’s almost like owning the movie and the book in my mind.

@venussuz is the price increase documented anywhere? I’d noticed they seamed higher lately, but it’s hard to tell since there was never a set narration price to begin with.

@kevlar51 No, Amazon/Audible made no announcement that they were changing/had changed the price on adding audio to kindle books owned but there was (and still is) an outcry about it in the Kindle and Audible Amazon forums. As they’re no longer searchable (or easily found), google Amazon discussions Audible forum - the top discussion right now is “Audible price increases (1.99 or 2.99 may be 7.49 now).” People are Not happy about this.

@venussuz

I seemed to have noticed far fewer kindle purchases I where would automatically buy the accompanying audible book. Too expensive.

Very disappointed to hear this is an official tactic.

They won’t get more total $ from me. They’ll get less. Quite a bit less.

Can you post links to some of those pricing discussions and topics here? I want to read them.

@f00l Here are five discussions from 4 sources. OK, one is a blog post, but readers comment.

https://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdThread=TxFPRLE9E3GKOU

https://www.amazon.com/forum/audible/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=FxIUSSCLASMNWD&cdThread=Tx32VSQPNGHB6XH

https://www.kboards.com/index.php?topic=251967.0

http://www.dailycheapreads.com/post/2017/06/29/05/48/29/167470/housekeeping-response-from-audible/post.html

@venussuz

Thx for info.

They are trying to kill a golden-egg-laying goose, so it would seem to me.

All in the name of short term greed.

@f00l They’re testing the market to find the price point at which consumers won’t upgrade to the audio format and I think they found it. A smaller, more incremental price increase would have been more successful from what I’ve read. Their algorithms should figure it out.

@venussuz

Re Amazon:

Fuck em.

I won’t torrent. I’ll get what I sorta want from friends or the library or a sale.

I’ll go ahead and buy a book I really want.

But some people will go back to “why not free?” pricing model over this sort of corporate gaming.

Funny thing. It’s in part the price point, with me.

And it’s in part that they did something great for readers, and then decided to game it away for more money.

I don’t like being gamed. I don’t like having a commercial offering that’s so great for everyone, and then having it taken away as part of an unnecessary profit experiment.

So the gaming is as much a negative to me as the prices rising.

I guess I should have known this was coming our way.

But fuck em.

@venussuz
Btw

how do you track changes in those forums? Or do you just visit every day? Do you know of other good sites discussing this?

Do you know: is there discussion of this on mobileread?

I haven’t followed any book forums in a long time.

@f00l You can track the Amazon forums by clicking ‘track this discussion’ for whichever ones you want. You’ll get email alerts when there are new posts. I think I’m tracking about 20 discussions now going back 6 years on Amazon. Reddit you just have to check back and see what people are saying this month/day/hour. If you want to follow an entire Amazon forum, best to bookmark and come back to it because you can’t access them from Amazon’s store site anymore. I haven’t checked mobilereads for a while, is that still an active community?

As for the gamification of shopping, other sites are starting to do it, but Amazon has been far ahead of others for a long time. If you check the price of an item then have a friend check the same thing, good chance you’ll get different prices, anywhere from a few cents to several dollars. That’s one of many tricks Amazon uses to get more people shopping on their site.

I haven’t used torrents for years as I believe in supporting the content creators, but I get most of my audio books from Overdrive because of the (IMO) high prices. I loved being able to get audio books for purchased ebooks so inexpensively, but as some said, I think those days are gone.

@venussuz

You can probably check prices for anything by just using an anon browser window.

If Amazon keeps this up, someone will prob get a fair amount of $ writing an app that tracks price history and differential pricing automatically.

@f00l I’ve done that and seen the price differences noted above.

I use a Chrome extension from camelcamelcamel to track price changes and alert me when the price of peanut M&M’s drops below a certain point. In other words, there’s an app for that and it’s free. Add honey (another extension) to that and you’re golden.

@venussuz
I am usually do a lot of stuff on mobile and you can’t do extensions with most browsers on mobile.

But thanks. I had not heard about the "honey " extension.

Unfortunately, I think camel x3 does not track digital price changes. I think Amazon won’t allow them to.

I always used camel x3 for notable purchases. I guess I’m going to have to start using them for the little stuff too.

And perhaps make a habit of getting my e-books and audiobooks from the library, since this new Amazon/audible pricing practice annoys me so much.

Amazon is playing with customer trust here. To me, for a company like Amazon, which can be deserted by customers in a flash, that’s not a good business decision.

They did this some years ago and it backfired. They were pilloried in the press and sales dropped instantly. I’m kinda surprised they want to try it again.

When Amazon does this stuff, it’s an instant opening to their competitors. Or so it would seem to me.

Do you know of any forum discussions that track Amazon trying to price game their customers across all products, not just digital sales items?

@f00l No, I don’t know of any discussions about price gaming but I know I’ve read articles about it. The thing they’ve gotten a lot of flack for in the forums lately is changing shipping from UPS and Fedex to USPS. They’ve gotten a lot of flack for this because the postal service isn’t timely resulting in many late deliveries and not all post offices deliver on Sunday contrary to what Amazon promises.

Amazon IS losing customer trust for this and other reasons. Unfortunately, many (including myself) still shop Amazon because the price is (usually) better than we can get elsewhere and they usually have on time delivery. If an item isn’t delivered on the guaranteed day, let them know and your Prime should be extended for a month.

@elimanningface

How many digits is in the number (or a close guess of the number) of your legally owned audiobook count then?

I probably win. Not kidding. I’ve been an audiobook fanatic for well over 2 decades.

When I call audible to talk to CS for some reason, and they open my account, every CS person seems to say something similar to “I’ve never seen an account with that many books before.”)

And this doesn’t include digital audiobooks from Nook and other sources, or audiobooks on cd and cassette.

I also like reading words on paper or in an e-book format. A lot. And I own lots of books in numerous formats. But I can’t effectively read words with my eyes while driving, or making my kitchen or storage space look like a sometimes same person is the primary user of the space.

So audiobooks.

@elimanningface But does amazon/audible own any audiobooks? There are digital masters, owned by the publisher, that amazon has distribution rights for to produce a digital copy to the consumer at the point of sale. But are there any copies in inventory that Amazon actually owns? I would say no. Everything on their servers is either a master owned by the publisher, or a sold copy owned by the consumer.

@DaveKnowsAll

Ok no lawyer or expert here. So … Dunno.

But small technical caveat. Amazon/audible is the publisher it record of a number of cases. Audible is really ramping that up.

@elimanningface

I misread your comment. That’s what I get for reading while on an escalator.

I was addressing the community here, in terms of ownership, not the universe. But it’s cool.

Obviously, the biggest publisher of audiobooks, whoever that is, owns the most, if you make owning copyright as the definition of ownership.

Otherwise, I suppose I don’t compete with The Library Of Congress.

Stop getting in the way of me flogging my obsession, please. It’s most disconcerting.

/giphy pwn

@f00l way things are going dude, your collection might rival the whatever is left of the Library of Congress’s so you’re probably right.

@InnocuousFarmer

When I discovered that I could listen to audiobooks much of the day, except when doing stuff that required explicit total focus, I came to love them.

At first, the fact that the book was, obviously, narrated by another party than the author (usually), bothered me a little: like I was experiencing some sort of “lesser version”, interpreted.

Then I got over that. Narrators can add; they can detract; they can be close to neutral. And it’s certainly possible that the words are not truly “pure” on the page either.

The book might be in translation in the first place. Or, what phrasing would the writer have used to convey that or a similar thought if the sentence had been written an hour or a day later? (Our brain are variable-state little monsters.)

Many or perhaps most writers are just not that careful with word choice. Some are, clearly.

Shakespeare obviously; and poets, and people who have high poetic skills. But many of these are written and intended as much for skilled recitation as for traditional reading in the first place.

As for those writers who word choices are precisely signal, and who did not compose with the thought of the work being read aloud in mind, it is possible to listen to the words as narrated and “strip out” almost all of the narrator’s “add”. Pretty easy with technical material. Can be done with almost anything, though it can take some practice.

What degree of “corruption of the text” is left after I have mentally attempted to edit out the narrator’s personal interpretation (or have convinced myself I have done this as well as I can without way way more effort than I intend to exert) would still contain the potential “corruption” of my own interpretative engine (mind, if I grant that I might have one) and whatever state or mood my mind was in.

I decided not to be too bothered by all that.

We rarely encounter material that “means what it means” regardless or psychology or intention of state of mind, except in technical material, code, science, math, and high-academic social science.

And even there … Code may be code may be code, since the “final reader” does not have a conventional biological brain. Same with dry technical material regarding objects or topics that are fairly simple or narrow, or are very very well understood by the community who reads about them. In which case the narrator’s “add” becomes immaterial. The audience knows how to read the content and context.

Even at high levels of care in choice of language, and high levels of rigorous thought and expression in very precise subject matter, there can be huge vatiabilities in the reader’s experience, interpretation, and understanding of the material, varying from from person or person, and from day to day, if the material is highly abstract.

Think some serious mathematical article from a “prestige journal” is read the same way, containing precisely the same context and interpretation, from person to person or from day to day (assuming the reader(s) to be very competent and will-versed in the topic)?

No. That’s not how that stuff reads at all. Never were personal conceptual universes and metaphors more of a constant and necessary presence. Mathematicians might write in hard-coded and hard-defined logical language. They don’t think in that language tho. Problems get solved in some “especially logical” personal metaphorical version of the universe of the imagination, with the conceptual metaphors varying greatly from mathematician to mathematician, and from day to day. Mathematician actually"try out" their imaginative conceptual metaphor, selling something that had “juice”. Then, when the possible solutions or transformations have been found, mathematician(s) have to translate their thoughts back to mathematical symbology on paper.

If the translation is done, and the assumed imaginative logical connections and implications hold rigorously when written down, then the inferemce chain may be a good one.

If the metaphors thoughts get translated to a “writeable language” one usually find flaws. Or is inoculate, and the mathematician is still “trying out”. Then the person must go back and do it all again and again, until something tight and strong and rigorous emerges that will satisfy the demands of the mathematical method.

In a way, it can be a lot like painting or some other artistic practice.

After all that - the intrusion of the extra presence of an audiobook narrator does not bother me too much.

Another thing I like about audiobooks is that, even tho I play them fast, they slow me down. I read too fast, unless I am really really interested. Audiobooks force to not mentally skip ahead so much. I “grok” more of the actual book. So the book had better be worth the time.

Listening to audiobooks is an art of itself. I am much much better at it than 2 decades ago. There is a way to put part of your brain into the book, part of your brain into whatever else you are doing, part of your brain into whatever thoughts you have that flow from the book experience and personal reaction, and let that run. Practice practice practice.

I use “pause” constantly. And I use “roll back x seconds” constantly and often repeatedly. There are so many worde and concepts to focus on, so others to float through.

Right now I am obsessed with podcasts though. Have way too many of those. I’ll get back to audiobooks soon enough.

/giphy audiobook

@f00l odd giphy for an audiobook.

With me, aside from sometimes finding a narrator’s delivery unaesthetic for some reason, I find that listening is a bit different of a sensory mode than reading. I’m a relatively slow reader, once I get into the flow of it and stop skimming. I like falling, when I can manage it, into that sensory void where there are only the words present as thought. (Sometimes I try to change it up and read more deliberately, so as to make sure to take in all the information that was recorded – that is also easier to do with text, in my experience.)

With audiobooks, my attention wanders more, and I will unconsciously tune it out in a way that is rarer for me with printed text.

That and I don’t have much of a commute.

Mainly it’s the podcasts providing so much competition.

@InnocuousFarmer
I spend more time listening to long form material than reading it nowadays.

Most of my visual reading is prob internet related. Quickie stuff.

If I were to start really “visual reading” deeply as a regular and constant habit again, I’ll prob have to work some to really get back into the practice and do it well.

I think a lot of the skillsets come from just training and effort and work and repetition and trying to make it all “give more”. Which means my brain has to figure out how to “get more” and then develop those skills.

What kinda podcasts are you into?

@f00l I’m not sure I could tell you what I’m into, as far as podcasts go, yet… the significant majority of episodes on my phone were downloaded onesie-twosie, out of curiosity.

I’ll try to list shows that I’ve listened to more than once, and at least somewhat recently. I’m noticing that I have probably heard about podcasts mostly on other podcasts, judging by connected hosts and podcast networks… and as I’m working on this, it’s getting embarrassingly long. Oh well. Almost done.

Catchall

• Debug — I like this show a lot. It’s interviews with programmers, generally. Circles Apple pretty heavily, but isn’t about Apple per se. Gets into internal history of various companies and software, sometimes gets technical, which is my favorite part.
• Pragmatic — an engineer (forget what kind. electrical, maybe.) talks about engineering. I’ve only listened to a few episodes. They were not quite dumb enough for me to get through them while driving.
• Basic Brewing Radio — it’s about homebrewing, has gotten specific on some of the ones that I’ve listened to.
• Song Exploder — I’ve downloaded dozens of these things, and listened to only one. It turns out that I never think to listen intently to music podcasts when I’m in a quiet room with the good headphones. Hopefully I can get in the habit before this podcast eventually fills up my phone.
• The Joe Rogan Experience — I gather this podcast is popular. It’s a long show about Joe Rogan being Joe Rogan and talking to people. I find it interesting to the extent that these are people who, mostly, do not have the same view of the world as I do. Sometimes the guests are legitimately interesting.

Business or Money

• Exponent — two Harvard MBAs talk about tech companies from the point of view (as though I could tell) of savvy business suit men.
• Under the Radar — show with advice for aspiring independent iOS developers. 30 minutes per episode. Focused on a given topic per episode, avoids programming as a subject for the most part. Host Marco Arment wrote Overcast, which is the podcast player that I use.
• EconTalk — I almost never listen to this, but I tend to like it when I do. kind of academic, requires attention, tends to be long.
• Radical Personal Finance — haven’t listened to this in what must be a long time, but it was interesting early on — a guy figures out how to make a high-volume podcast on the fly, by dint of sheer energy/effort and ambition. sometimes gets detailed about financial topics, sometimes does interviews.

General Interest / Featureish Things

• The Allusionist — blessedly short, about etymology for the most part. Host is Helen Zaltzman.
• The Kitchen Sisters Present — extremely relaxing show about uh… I’m making a gesture. I don’t know. It’s feature stories. (Did you know that George Foreman named all five of his sons George?)
• Radiolab (NPR)
• 99% Invisible — fairly analogous to Radiolab
• Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History — long, detailed, history
• The History of Philosophy — started listening, got about three episodes in, made a note to definitely listen, but probably take notes, and then neglected to get around to it again…
• Science Vs — pop science. Seems to be a reasonable depiction of the current consensus, on a given topic. Host sounds like an Australian woman.
• Planet Money (NPR) — don’t listen regularly, but remember being interested to the few that I did listen to.

News / Politics

• Pod Save the World — I’ve mentioned this one before. Interviews with ex-Obama foreign policy people, for the most part. Has basic information about the world, targeted at ignorant people like me, as opposed to being all inside baseball.
• The Bugle — comedic news. features weird British people, puns, historical facts that aren’t true… used to have John Oliver on it, before he got busy with his HBO show, causing this podcast to fade away before, somewhere between the two of them, the other host (Andy Zaltzman, brother of the Allusionist woman, Helen Zaltzman) and Oliver stopped being in denial about it.
• Intelligence Squared — has a US version too. These are (with exceptions, like that time they had radio hosts on) decent quality (I think?) debates about political topics, usually by book authors or academics, people like that.

Talking about nothing and/or Apple

I feel only mildly uncomfortable recommending the first one in this category. The rest… meh. I listen to them on and off for some reason. I probably heard about all of these from other podcasts in this same list.

I guess the idea here is, schedule your routine socialization as IP-based phone calls: get paid.

• Do By Friday — two people from Cards Against Humanity (wildly successful party game) talk to Internet-celebrity Merlin Mann (the joke is that he “used to be Merlin Mann”, when he was making a middle career of being a productivity guru, which is something he seems to be more embarrassed about than not). It’s legitimately funny every other show or so. Sometimes Max (Cards Against Humanity boss) goes on some inadvisable political rant. They often skip the task that they are “supposed” to do “by Friday”.
• Road Work — haven’t listened to more than the first few episodes… podcast network owner Dan Benjamin talks with indie rock man John Roderick about life, I guess.
• Food Safety Talk — a couple guys talk about whatever. I guess they’re both in food safety. At least one of them is an academic of some flavor, maybe a tenured professor or something.
• Core Intuition — two indie developers (macOS and iOS / web) talk about their independent software developer jobs. and/or Apple news.
• Reconcilable Differences — Merlin Mann again, plus a guy named John Siracusa. Two middle-old Internet/tech-oriented men talking about life.
• The Accidental Tech Podcast — three friends talking about tech industry “news” and occasionally their affection for cars. This is the show that keeps me in the loop about Apple nonsense, for the most part. Shares hosts with other shows that I listen to.

@f00l As an aside, I just realized that I did not mention that my job is one of those 100% concentration kinds of jobs–features a lot of programming. So I can’t listen to podcasts or audiobooks (or sometimes even music) when working.

@InnocuousFarmer

I’ve done some pod save the world ones, which are good.

And invisible and radiolab.

Some if the others you mention are loaded ands ready for when I get to them.

Have you tried Axe Files? By Dave Axelrod. Long form interviews with a single person. It made me slightly more tolerant (only slightly) of a political person I do not like. (Slightly tolerant of the person, not the accompanying politics, which are still monstrous.)

He talks to a pretty wide selectio, including non-political persons. Very interesting stuff.

Sunday I hope to catch all of them.

PS I understand about the coding.

@f00l I had downloaded a couple for some reason previously, but they got lost in the middle of the “political” playlist that I haven’t had the impulse to listen to in several weeks.

Just tried listening to 106 - Tammy Duckworth, which maybe I’ll finish later. (The notion of an America with non-military soft power post-Vietnam, having a positive reputation in the world, is kind of heartbreaking. Can’t imagine us ever getting back to that station.)

Any episodes in particular that you’d recommend? I see some that might be interesting, but probably need a certain level of emotional energy to listen to.

@InnocuousFarmer
Yeah I save up the Axe files for when I’m kinda in the mood.

There are some really interesting ones Axe has done with non-political people. He did one with Paul Simon.

It turns out Paul Simon went to High School with one if the people who was was a Civil Rights either in the 1960’s. The guy left NY and went to Mississippi to be a support to the movement. He was one of the three people murdered in the incident that was the basis for the Mississippi Burning film.

I found that really moving. It seems to have really affected Simon.

I’ll look thru the episode list and see what else I remember that I thought was really good. I’ve listened to perhaps 25% of them? Or less? But I think they are a treasure.

I haven’t listened to Axe in a while because, you know, the daily onslaught.

I try to do one or more of the “contemplative” ones several times a week. Right now I’m starting from the beginning of 99% Invisible.

I also really like Invisibilia.

@InnocuousFarmer
Aside from Paul Simon

Doris Kearns Goodwin
Bill Kristol
Carl Bernstein
Thomas Friedman
David Guggenheim
Steve Kerr
Larry Summers
Maureen Dowd
John Heilemann
John Dickerson

He gets interesting and more reflective- than contentious-type interviews from people whose political philosophy you don’t like, and from people you don’t like.

Dinner of the best episodes come from conversations with behind the scenes people. And ex-Secretaries, epi are usually a very reflective group.

If he interviewed wondering you really don’t like, don’t dismiss it without a listening trial. It’s nothing like cable news.

You can learn even from people who you believe have no morals. And it’s not a hateful, cringe-worthy, blood-pressure conversation. He lets them talk, but he reins it in what they wanna go polemical.

He gets them to talk like human beings instead of operatives or trolls .

@Barney

I’m an asshole-oh-oh-oh-oh.

Tra la.

@f00l

More good stuff, from the incomparable @glennf

Not read aloud tho : (

https://meh.com/forum/topics/nothing-is-lacking-the-long-history-of-intentionally-blank-pages

https://meh.com/forum/topics/capital-crimes-part-1--shout-shout-let-it-all-out?sort=most-likes

https://meh.com/forum/topics/capital-crimes-part-2-usenet-has-no-chill

https://meh.com/forum/topics/building-the-plane-on-the-way-up

https://meh.com/forum/topics/you-cant-quote-me-on-it

Hope I didn’t miss some of them.

And something related:

https://meh.com/forum/topics/how-many-of-you-double-space-after-a-period-at-the-end-of-a-sentence-1?sort=most-likes

@narfcake spam alert

@RiotDemon Fuck! I have the buttons, but I’m forbidden!

Halp, @thumperchick and/or @dave!

@narfcake Haha, good shirt pick

@narfcake

Help me, Obi-Narf. You are my only help.

@f00l Read my post above. I can’t!

@ACraigL

Yeah. As a narrator, Jim Dale rocks.