I am a big fan of Audible for their amazing collection of great audiobooks. I go through about a book a month (saving a few for the summer when I go through many more). It has always worked fine to download the books on my laptop and then sync them over to my iPhone using iTunes. However, when Audible came out with their own app I just had to try it out.
To be honest my first reaction was that this might be rather useless. Why replace a method that is working perfectly fine for me? The reason is simplicity and mobility. With my Audible app I have access to the entire Audible store with their total collection of audiobooks, which is great for when you don't have the ability to sync with iTunes. Note though that the store takes you to Safari.
Sucker for stats
Here's the deal though, I am a sucker for stats. Part of the Audible app is giving you listening levels that you can reach depending on how many hours you have been listening. Since I listen a lot, this gives me the just the incentive I need to…yes, listen more! Sadly I cannot get all the hours I have listened to audiobooks from Audible on the iPod app in to the app, which means you are starting from zero.
Listening Experience
To be honest, the listening experience itself isn't very different but the app does bring a few extra features which are pretty cool. First of all you have a button free mode, where the listening is controlled by swiping movements on the screen (clearly indicated). If you are the type of person who listens to a book before going to sleep, you might be thrilled to find a sleep mode which shuts the playing off after a given number of minutes. I would love to see this combined with Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock to sense when I have fallen asleep…
Moreover there are options for narration speed, slowing it down and speeding it up in more levels than the iPod app can and what would an app be without support for sharing across Facebook, Twitter and email. What I like is the ability to bookmark a place in the book so that you can easily go back to revise and listen again, just to that specific place. This bridges the gap between audio and text slightly, in terms of re-visiting.
Conclusion
First of all I would like to recommend Audible for great audiobooks if you are not yet a subscriber. If you are, I think you should download the app and give it a try. It offers some enhanced features compared to listening via the iPod app. All that's left to do is to remember to open this app instead.
