AudiobooksNow Review LORIS – Server4ReviewApps

PROS / AudiobooksNow.com has some of the best book prices we saw.CONS / The monthly fee you pay to access the service’s discounted audio books adds up.

VERDICT / If you like hunting for deals, AudiobooksNow.com offers up some great bargains.

As with a Costco membership, you pay AudiobooksNow.com’s monthly fee to access discount pricing. You get one free premium audio book when you sign up and then a 50 percent discount on the first book you buy each month. If you purchase another book during the same month, the discount goes down to between 30 and 40 percent.An AudiobooksNow.com membership can get you some good deals if you have the time and inclination to shop the site extensively. The service only really works if you’re not too selective when adding audio books to your library. Usually, I pick my next audio book based on recommendations from friends, family and reviewers I trust, and I don’t want to factor in price every time I get one – I like paying a flat fee to get any title I want so I can just keep moving down my wishlist.

AudiobooksNow.com’s prices are some of the cheapest available, though only by a small margin. But, while the membership fee is a low $4.99 a month, it doesn’t include any books, unlike a credit-system membership. As such, you have to add the membership fee to the price of the first book you buy per month, which shoots the average up nearly $5.

AudiobooksNow.com also only hosts around 80,000 books, which is less than half of what Audible keeps in stock. Also, when we searched for popular titles from 2016, we only found about 75 percent of the books on our list.

Each book has a product page that includes other recommendations and reader reviews, which can help you decide if you want to add the title to your collection. One of the benefits of AudiobooksNow.com’s smaller library is that a lot the books don’t have Digital Rights Management (DRM) protections on them, so you can share them and listen to them on as many devices as you want.

You can browse for new books in the app, which makes it easy to download your next selection. However, the playback page is a little cluttered; I liked the more streamlined look of Audiobooks.com and Audible’s apps. Still, it has all the playback features I looked for, including variable playback speed and jump length, which give you control over your listening experience. These features are found right on the app’s player, so you don’t have to search for them in other menus. You can also choose between streaming the audio book or downloading the audio files to the app. In addition, you can listen to your books from the service’s webpage.

You can reach customer support by telephone during normal business hours (EST) as well as by email, and service representatives are quick to respond. As with several of the services I researched, AudiobooksNow.com’s FAQs page isn’t extensive, but it has a search bar to help you find quick answers.