Teo Degas' Books & Decks

Audible is one of the best and more domineering apps for audio books in the market. I have been using the app first on my PC and then on my smartphone for many years.

The selection of books is the best you can fin, not only novels, but also for non-fiction books and educational stuff. This is the case for Audible America, as other subsidiary branches are not even half as good and I would rather subscribe to Audible America than to Audible whatever country even if you pay a little bit more.

 Here a wrap-up of my experience with Audible

THE GOODIES

>> Audible is a great listening app devoted to Audible-formatted audio books.

>> The app is really easy to use and move around.
>> In the lateral menu you can find almost anything: your library, the store, wish-list, FAQ, settings, etc. Besides, the vertical triple dots beside the account name and beside each book give you extra options.

>> You can decide whether to download the books into your device or your SD card.

>> You can choose the quality of the recording you download, standard or HQ, the latter being almost double in size.

>> If you are registered with Amazon, you can access Audible without the need of having to register or signing in again.

>> You can listen to your books online, on your PC, on your tablet and smartphone. I do have them in three different devices and I have no problem at all.

>> Customer Service is easy to reach by phone, mail and chat and they are very helpful and lovely people!

>> One can report a problem or bug from the app itself, from the help section.
>> Good quality sound, crystal-clear recordings and well presented works.

AUDIBLE IS ESPECIALLY GOOD IF

> If you are blind and rely on audio books for reading.

> If your purchase audio books mostly from Audible and don't need or want them to use them in Universal readers with other audio books from other stores.

> If you pay for the Annual Platinum Membership, you get two credits per month and will be paying about 10 bucks per item.

> If you are buying a book that has the same price or less than the version on paper or Kindle.

> If you are buying an unabridged copy of a long book or a series compiled together.

> If you are buying a course with many lectures, like those from The Great Courses and The Modern Scholar, as they are great value for money, and much cheaper than the CD or Video recording, and they come with the full companion book on PDF.

> If you spend your credits on expensive books, not on the cheapies. One credit can buy you a 10-buck audio book or a 60-buck audio book, so the latter is always the best value for money. If you have a long list of books you are interested on, choose the most expensive!

> If you know that the narrator of a book is really good. You can pre-listen to the course, for free, before buying. That gives you a clear idea, or at least does so to me.

> If you are a traveller or just move a lot between cities or countries, any digital format is the best thing for your life-style, as they don't need to be packaged or carried, and you have them always available in your member area.

THE NOT SO GOOD

~ Audible plans are pricey. I understand that an audible book is not just a book,as the process of recording and the paying of the narrator need to be taken into account. The price cannot be the same as printing a copy on paper or publishing an e-book. However, some books are still expensive for average families, especially if you are an avid reader or listener!

~ The simple membership per month is almost 15 bucks, but one gets just one credit. In the past used to be two!

~ One cannot find the annual memberships in the member area. One has to surf the FAQ and then contact Customer Service to get the subscription done. That is a pity because the annual memberships are the best option for people, or at least for me.

~ If you buy a Kindle book and there is an Audible version of the same, the latter is offered to you at reduced prices. Well, the contrary is not the case! I recommend checking the Kindle format first and them buying the audio book if you really want the two, instead of doing the contrary. It will save you money.

~ The chapters do not have title in the lateral menu, just numbers. That is so unhelpful!

~ The app is synchronizable and you can buy from the app, so they need access to a few things in your device: identity, phone number, acces to Wi-Fi and microphone. I am OK with that. What I am not OK is with Audible-Amazon having an open door to my contacts (why?!), my photos, media, device id, call log, etc. 

~~ You cannot read your audible books in other apps as they are DRP docos, even when the authors themselves are OK with you having the right to use the book the way you like it once you purchase it.

~~ When you buy an Audible book you are just hiring the copy for life, sort of, you cannot lend it to your mum or "bestie" for reading as you would do with a hard copy. In other words, you don't own the book, you own the right to have your book in your member area as long as you are member. 

THINGS TO IMPROVE

> As previously mentioned, the chapters do not have titles in the lateral menu, just numbers. That would be easy to fix!

> The statistics suffer from some sort of bug, and don't seem to be accurate or synchronise properly. And they could enlarge the group of badges to include those referred to humanities, sciences, religion, entertainment, literature, other languages, etc.

> I cannot transfer my files from my android to my computer and listen to them in my PC. This is a bother, because my Internet is monthly quota-capped and downloading bulky files twice is a no-no. Why not fixing that?!

> Improve the pricing. Make more types of memberships and reward people who use the app a lot.

> I used to love Audible logo, but it has become another orange bland logo without distinctive personality. Please change it!

I have this app installed in all my gadgets. I use it on a daily basis and I have done so for many years. I rarely read on paper nowadays, and part of the reason is because how comfortable and enjoyable the reading experience is in Kindle. The fact that the app is free is nothing I take for granted. The Kindle App is an awesome app, but not perfect.

Here a wrap up of my experience using Kindle.

THE BRIGHT SIDE OF THINGS

 <> Kindle allows you to read comfortably by letting you adjust the type of font, size of the font, colour of the background, interlinear space and margin space in your reading area.
<> The side bar is very useful to move throughout the book, between books and to access and manage your notes and highlights. You can even edit those in a batches to create a personalised notebook with them.
<> Variety of background colours: white, sepia, green (this is the last addition and quite enjoyable), and black (my least favourite).

<> Normal books download really fast. Graphic books a bit slower but quite fast as well. Of course the speed of your data connection matters, but it is not just that. 

<> All your books are safely stored in the Amazon's cloud, for which you will never lose them. You can erase them from your device if you wish, something I do so as not to bulk the memory of my tablet and phones, or erase them from a place and not for other.

<> The app is fully synchronisable and you can leave a book in page 10 in a gadget, reopen it in another gadget, and the app will tell the last page in the book you were reading and if you want to go there or not.Synchronisation also affects your highlighted text.

<> Many of the issues in the past affecting  graphic and illustrated books, have been solved, especially since Amazon acquired Comixology, as the reading of comics was and is better in the latter because they focus just on comics. At present, there is little difference regarding the quality of the reading experience in Comixology, and Kindle and you can decide whether reading on one or the other depending the book you have purchased. If the editors bother to prepare them accordingly, you will have a fantastic experience, moving around the pages, moving from vignette to vignette, zooming in and out and feeling that you have the comic book in your hands.
<> If you wish, you can access the Kindle shop from your Kindle app, browse books, add them to your lists and purchase them using your preferred settings. 

SUGGESTIONS TO  IMPROVE THE APP,

+ Launch updates when they are ready and trouble free. If Amazon needs testers, search for them and use them before the general public downloads any update.

+ Add a light green colour highlighter. At the moment most of the highlights are warm colours except for blue. I don't like the orange highlighter as it looks ugly in all backgrounds.

+ Add a few more reading fonts to enhance customisation and allow a more enjoyable reading.
+  Allow the use of fonts that are scalable in size, so you can go from size 1 to 2 in several steps is you want, not in just one jump. 

 + Add a light grey reading background and make the black background perhaps a dark grey. The latter works better than black as it offers high contrast for poor-sighted people but it is much enjoyable for reading.

+ Add a visual effect for page-passing (like Google's reader) as this makes the reading more natural and real. That improvement has been due for years. 

+ Fix a dysfunction, or perhaps a bug, that turns some books that have their text fully justified into non-justified when you increase the font size.
+ When cutting and pasting bits of a given book, allow customers to choose whether pasting them with the bibliographic reference in full, as it happens now, or perhaps a short version of it. I use the cut and paste for personal reasons at times, and others for quoting or keeping some work material together, so I don't always need the bibliographic reference pasted in full every single time I copy a bit of text. 

+ Add the customer's list/s to the recommended readings in the home screen area. At the moment, we get the suggestions made by Amazon on its own accord, i.e. following an algorithm. In my case I have never purchased any of the book suggested, so it is a waste of your time and my space, Mr Algorithm. If the items in my book lists were displayed there, I would buy them more often.
+ The developers keep updating the app all the time, which is intrinsically good. I see major updates in Kindle and how they have improved my reading experience and the use and versatility of the app. However, I don't find acceptable the frequency of the updates and the fact that customers are the lab rats to test them. Most developers do the same, to be fair, but the fact that everybody is doing it, shouldn't be an excuse to keep doing it.
+ I would work on a way to compressing the graphic book files still offering great quality of image and detailed zooming. At present, most comics are between 100-200 MB, some of them reaching the 500. OK if you have unlimited Internet, if you use mobile Internet or data-capped Internet, that is a lot of money you are paying for downloading a graphic book. 
 + The search tool is not the best search too around, let me tell you. I would invest some effort in improving it.

OBVIOUS, BUT IT NEEDS TO BE SAID

This is an app developed by a merchant called Amazon to sell us books in its own format, called Kindle books, which Amazon sells to you.  Therefore, you cannot read, oh surprise! surprise?, Kobo books, Pub books, PDF books, documents and or any other book that is not in Kindle format. Actually, you can read PDF and doc. documents, but Kindle is not designed for that and handles them badly. You can still find online tools to convert any of those books into Kindle and use them in your Kindle. You can also use other apps to turn articles in the Wikipedia and read them in Kindle. Yet, doing the opposite is impossible or almost. It used to be possible in the past, but the results were pathetic.  

COLLATERAL DAMAGE
Some books are not really ready for Kindle; therefore, depending on the case, you cannot use the final index, cannot see some of the images properly, or the notes are a bit messed up. Of course, this is not the developers' fault, but it affects my Kindle experience. Amazon should be working to let editors know that their books won't be accepted into Kindle unless properly prepared. Is that or charging Kindle customers less money for ebooks.

MY ADVICE TO CUSTOMERS

Get the app and try it. However, do not update the app frequently unless it is malfunctioning and you see that the new releases have good reviews in Amazon and Google Play. It will save you time, data, and a headache at times.