Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Those who’ve read my blog for a while will know of my long-time membership with Audible.com, which provides audio books in the form of digital files you download from their site, kind of like MP3 files, but with copy-protection. Initially, one could sign up for a subscription that would give you five audio books per month for $30 or so, only $6 for each book! Nice deal except that unless you spend most of your waking time listening to the stuff – maybe if you’re a truck driver or something similar where you always can listen while doing other things – eventually you’ll probably get behind on your pile of books!

Eventually, as Audible grew, they dropped the book total down to where it is now – two (alternately you can get one book and one “subscription” to a radio show, magazine or newspaper transcript), for $20 per month, or $10 per book. Still not bad compared to the exorbitant rates you see for books at a Borders or Barnes and Noble – anywhere from $15 to $100 depending on how long the book is and whether it’s abridged or not. Books you buy via your subscription at Audible are based off of your monthly “credit” meaning the equivalent of $10, no matter the length. However, the problem is that you are limited to those two books. If you want to purchase more in a given month, you can, but you have to pay the higher Audible price, which is just a more discounted version than what you would pay in a bookstore, or what the book is listed for. So it’s still a savings, but you can also end up paying $50 for one book, if not more.

Once in a while, Audible has sales, and today Audible happens to be having a type of sale that I’ve only seen once before, maybe twice, in the last year or two. This sale entitles any Audible.com member to buy as many books as they want at a flat rate of $10 per book. There are so many great books on Audible’s site, that I have a hard time keeping my wish list under 400 titles, so this will help me out. Later today I’ll probably by a bunch of titles I’ve been eyeing for a few months now. Trust, me, though, it will still be a tiny fraction of my wish list!

Apparently, you can sign up for Audible.com count today and take advantage of the same sale for customers – this according to Audible.com customer support. One can sign up without a yearly contract, but what I have done in the past is take advantage of a deal that Audible has that gives you $100 off of a whole series of devices that can play audible files, including iPods, Treo 600’s, and many others. A third option is to sign up for a year and get a free Muvo MP3 player to play your music on.

In any case, if this entry does end up motivating you to start an account with Audible (“leviwallach”), all I ask is that you enter my audible ID as the referrer, as this will give me an extra book credit or two. Again, this sale is only for today – September 15, 2004, so if you are reading this even a day after, you’re already too late, sorry, but Audible is still worth a look if you like Audio Books and don’t want to deal with the hassle of tapes, the expense of retail price, or the inconvenience of library borrowing.

Update: Oops! This sale is not one day as I mention above! Maybe the last one was just a day and that’s what confused me. This one turns out to be 10 days! It lasts throug September 24. Sorry about that!