This entitles you to two audiobooks a month from a curated collection of 300-400 titles, plus you will get free access to short stories and podcasts. Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images Support UK independentsĪ new alternative to Audible – particularly if you plan to listen to two books a month and are keen to support authors and small, independent presses – is a Spiracle subscription for £12 a month or £120 a year. Similarly, at Scribd – which describes itself as a library and allows you to “borrow” an unlimited number of audiobooks while you are a member, in return for £10.99 a month – only 42% of our choices were available.īookBeat charges from £5.99 a month for its subscription service. Only 17 (34%) of the titles we wanted to hear were available on BookBeat. This entitles you to 20 hours of listening a month (it also has pricier options offering up to 100 hours) – so enough time to hear Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie (eight hours, 13 minutes) twice but not Ulysses by James Joyce (37 hours, 35 minutes). Overall, the cheapest subscription service we found was BookBeat, which charges only £5.99 a month. Kobo and Apple Books offered better value when it came to this category, selling these audiobooks for as little as 99p. Our research suggests it is often not, however, the cheapest place to buy a classic novel. Xigxag has some good ethical credentials, too – it is a certified B Corp company, indicating the business successfully adheres to high social and environmental standards, and was designated an Ethical Consumer best buy for audiobooks. “You can’t buy audiobooks secondhand the way you can with physical books, so it’s great to have such a cheap option,” she says. She now gets most of the books she buys from xigxag and says she feels smug when she pays £3.99 for a book that costs £25 elsewhere. Leitch likes the flexibility of this non-subscription approach. Photograph: AlexeyPelikh/Getty Images/iStockphoto You can reduce upfront prices by subscribing to a particular collection of audiobooks. For example, if you buy more than 20 titles, your subsequent purchases that year will be £3.99 each. Instead, loyalty is rewarded: while titles never cost more than £7.99 at this retailer, the more you buy, the less you will pay for the rest of that year. Xigxag, by contrast, doesn’t operate a subscription model. Both allow a single credit to be used to buy expensive £24.99 audiobooks such as Where the Crawdads Sing, so subscribers effectively pay a third of the price charged to non-subscribers. Kobo charges less: £6.99 a month, again for one credit, which you can redeem against any of the titles in its catalogue. Audible members receive one credit each month in exchange for a monthly £7.99 subscription. You can dramatically reduce most of these upfront prices by subscribing to a particular collection, however, and buying the book with a “credit”. To give an example of how prices can differ, at the time of writing, the audiobook of the bestselling novel Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens was £24.99 on Audible, £24.99 on Kobo, £24.90 on Spotify, £9.99 on Apple Books, and £7.99 on xigxag. However, the savings on individual books at xigxag can be significant. Of those four, and indeed across all the commercial audiobook services we looked at, xigxag consistently offered the most significant savings and charged the lowest average price: £7.68 a book.Īpple Books was close behind, charging £8.81 a book on average. However, most titles – more than 80% – were also available to buy from Apple Books (98%), Kobo (92%), Spotify (90%) and xigxag (84%). Only Audible offered access to 100% of the 50 titles we chose, for an average upfront cost of £16.57 a book to non-subscribers. We randomly chose 50 different audiobooks – 10 classic novels, 10 nonfiction books and the rest a mixture of popular bestsellers and literary fiction – and checked to see which titles were available where, and how much they would cost. Guardian Money put 15 different audiobook collections to the test: Audible, Apple Books,, BBC Sounds, BookBeat, BorrowBox, Kobo, LibriVox, Listening Books, OverDrive, Scribd, Spiracle, Spotify, uLibrary and xigxag. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images Our main findings Audible has dominated the UK audiobook market for years but there are plenty of other options.
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