I’m a visual learner. As an artist I’m used to learning by practice and attribute most of it from my hands on learning process. Reading has always been tedious and my mind usually drifts to a point where my eyes are scanning the sentences and I’m completely in another world. Enter a dilemma that needed some distraction to keep my mind occupied. I drive an hour both ways to and from work. I needed something other than the same albums I’ve listened to time and time again, NPR or your basic rock radio station. Once I started a route of self-awareness I discovered Audible about a year ago and have listened to a book a week on average since then. It’s opened my mind to new perspectives, different walks of life, history from some of the strangest points in our world, etc… Reading and education is a pathway towards discovering things in yourself that you’ve never thought possible and thankfully for me listening to audio books have gotten me to a point where I crave more knowledge.
Audible’s interface is quick, intuitive and a no nonsense layout that gets straight to the point. It has your collection in My Library, an area to find new books in Discover, the current book you’re listening to, channels which I think is a space for podcasts (I don’t use this area that much) and finally more which is basically your settings in a nav at the bottom. You can download all of the titles onto your device or you can keep it clean by just having the titles that you’re listening to at the time available.
I have a few suggestions that I think would make the app way better. First is IN APP PURCHASES! If there’s one major drawback to this app is that the user can not directly purchase and download right from the app. They make you go to your audible account on their website and purchase it that way… it’s kind of a bummer. You can add books to your wishlist from the discover part but all in all, get it together guys and make direct purchases in app. The second thing that I think would make this app much better is streaming the content. This isn’t 2011 where the MP3 has to be fully downloaded and take up all of the space on my phone in order to listen to these books. The option to download would be great, however, streaming the content would be ideal for freeing up unnecessarily bulky files on my phone. All in all, for the value it delivers and the deals that they regularly have, it’s a solid app that provides great story telling that is most of the time right from the author themselves! I definitely recommend it for those who are trying to better themselves through the amazing educational experience of audiobooks!
– Aa
