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Sebastian

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Audible is Awesome

Sebastian
2 years ago
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I generally try to buy things piecemeal - I'm a believer in Felix Dennis's adage that "Overhead walks on two legs." So I try to buy things individually, which lets me have a good grasp on where money is going.

But Audible is awesome. At some point, I made the switch from reading to listening to most of my books, and the service is bloody amazing.

They have a "credit" system where you sign up, and you get one credit for month, and one credit gets you an audiobook. $7.49 for the first three months, then $15 per month after that. They also send out targeted offers to buy credits cheaply.

I just finished Anthony Everitt's "Augustus" and got started on Ted Turner's "Call Me Ted." Just bought Jan Morris's Heaven's Command from the Pax Britannica series too. They have tons of fiction if that's your thing, but I'm more impressed with their catalog of history and biographies which are the hardest kind of books for me to find digital copies of. I'll pick up Ron Chernow's "Washington" and "Hamilton" biographies after I finish Call Me Ted and Heaven's Command.

Also, another option to think about - a friend of mine who is huge into audiobooks shared a tip - you can share an account with up to 3 mobile devices, so my buddy splits a 2-credit-per-month account with his two roommates and they can all listen. It's a cool option if you have a regular reading club.

Go check Audible. I love it. Heartily endorsed.

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Hey Sebastian, just a couple quick notes:

I used audible for a few months. The audiobooks are great, and it's pretty easy to use. Even though they're owned by Amazon, and I love Amazon, I've found them to be particularly annoying a few ways.

(1) I was paying $15 a month. I had a bunch of stuff to listen to that I already wasn't getting to, so I decided to cancel. They hit me with an "are you sure?" offer that cut the rate to $7.95 a month. I figured, why not, that's a pretty damn good deal. I didn't see any fine print on the offer page, so I clicked ok. $7.95 rate lasted for a month and then promptly jumped back up to $15. WTF?

(2) After I noticed the increase in cost, during a real busy time where I didn't want to screw around with arguing about $7, I just decided to cancel. Try cancelling your account. Seriously. It was tough to find the link the first time I did it (above). The second time, it was invisible. Which is probably why there's 20 million google results for "how to cancel your audible subscription." Pretty weak stuff, Audible. When I finally found the page to cancel, since I've already cancelled before, they attempted to make me call to cancel. This is absurd. Luckily, their system isn't so great so I was able to back up, choose a different reason for quitting, and then cancel online.

Anyway, the books are great. Their customer experience, however, isn't anywhere near Amazon quality.

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It's always good to go through the histories of founders of great nations, and this is no different. Of particular note is that Chernow is as thorough as ever, going through Washington's business dealings and carefully noting his dress, horseback riding style, and the routes he took when campaigning both militarily or touring as a political leader.

The book drags sometimes - Chernow's hyper-thorough, which is fantastic except when you want the pace to pick up - but some of the details are really fantastic. I got some great ideas on dress, presentation, ethics, communication, building intelligence networks, recruiting, endurance, and diplomacy from the book. Also, the ending of the book is probably the most interesting - seeing how Washington and Hamilton modeled the Federalist platform loosely on British Imperialism was amazingly insightful. The points about state debt, finance, and taxation were fascinating.

Enjoyed this one quite a lot and feeling much more intelligent about early American affairs.

Audible doing the awesome $5 thing again

I love Audible. They get it.

They're doing the $5 book sale thing again, so I'm basically copying my "Amazing. I just bought 32 audiobooks for $158" post from a few months ago here.

If you're a reader and audiobook person at all, then this might be the best sale you've ever seen. Audible just announced 200+ titles for $4.95 each. There's some good ones in there, too.

Last time, I got 32 of them. Most of those are on sale again, I just found 11 more I like and bought them for $55 -

I, Claudius $4.95 Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History $4.95 Mere Christianity $4.95 The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable $4.95 Master and Commander: Aubrey/Maturin Series, Book 1 $4.95 Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant $4.95 Seven Events That Made America America: And Proved That the Founding Fathers Were Right All Along $4.95 A Confederacy of Dunces $4.95 The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral - and How It Changed the American West $4.95 The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, The Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World $4.95 The Free World $4.95

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