Audio Books are basically audio recordings of books narrated by a popular celebrity or volunteers. Audio Book are great source of relaxing entertainment.
In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to listen to audio books on your Android device using both free and paid apps.
Audible (Paid)
To get the best experience, Audible is the best choice for listening to high quality audio books. The app is owned by Amazon.com and the library contains over 180,000 titles. The books quality is amazing and most are read by renowned celebrities.
The app is completely free, but it offers a subscription based service. You will have to subscribe to one of the plans according to your need. You can subscribe for 1 or 2 books a month plans, costing $14.95 and $22.95 respectively.
The downloaded books are DRM-protected (Digital Rights Management) and can only be used with Audible player. You can easily move books from one phone to another. You can find popular titles such as, Three: Legends of the Duskwalker, narrated by Luke Daniels or Gone Girl, narrated by Kirby Heyborne.
The Audible player will let you search for the book right inside the app and you can play a demo to check how it will sound before downloading. You can search audio books by Genre, author and narrator. You can navigate between book chapters, bookmark them and also adjust play speed.
Librivox (Free and legal)
Librivox is a free alternative to Audible, but it is not even close to the narrative quality books audible offers. The app is ad supported (ads removed with a premium purchase of $1.99). The books available here are either very old (public domain) or written to be distributed as free. The narrators are also volunteers, so the experience might not be consistent.
If you are looking to listen to some classics, there are over 50,000 books waiting for you. You can search for books according to genre, author and freshness. Just click on any book and it will play in the Librivox player with separate chapters. You can easily move between chapters and also see a description of what the book is all about. The books can also be downloaded for later use without any kind of restrictions.
Use a Dedicated Audio Book Player
You can also use a dedicated audio book player to listen to your favorite books. The player will only play the audio books and provide the necessary customization options. You will have to download/sideload the books individually on your phone for the player to play. The standard format is Mp3, so it is recommended that you use audio books in MP3 format..
This can be a handy option if you don’t want to subscribe to paid services or get stuck in an app’s ecosystem. You can download books from websites such as, Simple Audio Books, Audio Book Store and Loyal Books.
A good player for playing audio books is Smart Audio Books. It has quite good reputation on Google Play Store and offers all the necessary tools to listen to audio books comfortably. You can control playback speed, manage sleep time, playback history, and autoplay after an incoming call.
The above apps should be able to fulfill your audio book listening needs, if you would like to add any further information, let us know in the comments below.