Live Audio

Today Recorded Books released Theft of Swords through audible.com. This audio book was recorded by Tim Gerard Reynolds, is 22 hours and 37 minutes long and sells for $41.99. I expect that the audio book will eventually populate through other venues such as Amazon (as Amazon owns Audible) in the next few days or weeks. If you prefer to obtain it there, it should appear on the standard Theft of Swords page under the audio book version.

I haven’t heard the recording yet. I’ve only listened to the short sample on the Audible site. And as I do not get a complimentary copy, I will need to buy my own if I want to hear it—which of course I do. I’ve never bought audio books before, never even investigated them and to be honest I was surprised by the price. $41.99 seems expensive for a book,  but apparently in this case it’s cheap. When you consider that Theft of Swords is an omnibus, and a single book (about 10 hours long) on Audible is usually $27.99, they should have charged $55.98 for Theft.

Despite this it still seems pricy. I couldn’t imagine spending even $27.99 for all the books I “read,” and yet I’ve heard of people whose only source of books are audio. My wife however, tells me that Audible and other places have Netflix-like offers, where you pay for a membership and are then able to…well you don’t have to listen to me, here is what Audible actually says on their site:

Get your first 3 months for only $7.49/month*

and just $14.95/month thereafter. Cancel anytime.

AudibleListener® Gold Membership

With AudibleListener Gold, you can choose to download any of 100,000 audiobooks and more, and listen on your iPod®, iPhone®, BlackBerry, or 500+ MP3 players.Your membership includes:

• One monthly credit good for any audiobook you choose to download
• 30% off any audiobook purchased without a credit
• Free daily subscription to The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal
• Member-exclusive sales and promotions

AudibleListener® Gold Membership Details
* Get the first 3 months of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan for just $7.49 per month, which includes one credit. For your convenience, your membership will automatically renew each month and the monthly membership fee will be billed to the credit card you used when you registered with Audible. After the 3 months, your credit card will be billed the regular membership price of $14.95 per month. With your membership, you will receive one credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. Cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. See the terms and policy applicable to Audible memberships.

So if I read this correctly, for your $14.95 per month you get to hear a book a month for no extra cost. $14.95 is the actual cover price that I charged for the original printed version of Emerald Storm, but here you’re getting both Crown and Avempartha. So you would actually be getting each book for $7.50. That’s less than the cost of mass market paperbacks and any of the ebook versions of my series including the ebook version of Percepliquis.

Under those conditions, I might be interested in trying this out, and if you know of other similar deals for audio books—in particular mine—let me know.