Audible Price Complaints

April 25, 2009

I have been a member of Audible.com for almost as long as the service has been running with a 8 month break in service during a billing snafu that resulted in me getting super annoyed and canceling for a while about 6 years ago.

The service used to be great(getting an audio book online when you wanted it), but customer service and ease of browsing navigation for Audible books has always been terrible.

I have always been super annoyed with their subscription plans, mostly because they can not be paused without cancelling your entire account. From my perspective, there are typically periods of time, when I don’t want the service for 2 –3 months. This usually happens for two reasons:

I’ve read too many books and I need a break from reading for a couple months
Audible’s site makes it so difficult to find books I want to read that I give up for a month or two.

Regardless, I have a new complaint about Audible, and this one might drive me away from the service all together. Its pricing.

They have recently started charging 2 credits (the equivalent of 2 months worth of subscription fees or $30) for the download of many unabridged books.

From my perspective, an abridged book, just isn’t worth reading. So in making this move, Audible is doubling the price of their books. Maybe making this even worse, this seems to happen on those books that I can actually find and want to read on Audible, as opposed to the masses of books that seem to clutter their system.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a book worm and read hundreds of books each year, sometimes even a thousand or more. I’m not super picky, because I can read very fast. For example, I have read the first 3 books in the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer since Monday.

I had thought about listening to the fourth book, but the price got in the way.

So now, not only can I not find books on Audible, but when I do find them the price is double.

This might just be the thing that drives me to drop the service entirely.

Posted in Audible Books, books

2 Responses to “Audible Price Complaints”

Granite:

June 29, 2009 at 4:43 pm

I agree Brett. More and more books keep showing up as two credits, whereas it used to be incredibly rare to come across a two credit book. If it gets much worse I’ll drop the service as well, as it’ll be so much cheaper to just buy the hard copy.
Jeff:

September 14, 2009 at 10:44 pm

I definitely agree! I actually wrote them and complained, but they couldn’t care less.

I’m really annoyed with them right now over a few things. Back in Feb or ’09 I bought Shadow Kiss by Richelle Mead. This is a good book and was a re-read for me. I read the print version and when the audiobook showed up I listened to that too. The problem was is was missing an entire chapter. Chapter nine. I contacted them on February 13 and alerted them to the problem. I got a polite email stating they would fix it. I checked back on March 12 for an updated version, still missing chapter nine. I contacted them again. They said they have “elevated” it to some special elevation. Well April 3rd rolls around and I check back again. Still the old version. This entire time I have been waiting, they have still been selling a butchered copy of the book to unsuspecting customers. I asked them in the second email why they still had it up. The CSR said that she had requested it to be pulled or have a notation added to the page. That never happened. I also asked them why they would’t send a email out to all the customers with bad copies. They never directly answered that question, and as far as I can tell, they never alerted any customers to the problem.

Something else that never happened? I put in a review in early February about it missing a chapter, the review was never posted. Did you know Audible edits reviews? Apparently if it might hurt sells, like this would have, they just hit the delete key.

So, incomplete books, dishonest behavior, deleting unfavorable reviews, and charging two credits for one book. I’m pretty much done with Audible. But I still have a contract with them to finish up. December and it’s done.