If you’ve been around here long, you know I’ve got a thing for good audiobooks.

I still love to be read to myself, and my kids just love an audiobook read by a skilled narrator.

Audible is one of my favorite place to get audiobooks, as they make finding and streaming audiobooks a breeze. I love how easy they are to buy, play, and bookmark.

If you’re looking for FREE audiobooks, you can find a list the RAR Community compiled of free favorite audiobooks and narrators from Librivox right here.

I prefer the Audible service for ease of use and sound quality, but you can find a lot of public domain classics for free on Librivox, if that’s better for your budget.

My favorite place for audiobooks: Audible

Because we have a list of Audiobook Favorites, I get a lot of questions about the Audible service itself.

This page is a collection of those questions and answers. If you have a question that isn’t answered here, your best bet is to contact Audible’s awesome customer service team.

Click on any of the following questions to go straight to the answer:


Should I pay for an Audible subscription?

Here’s the short story: you don’t need an Audible subscription to listen to audiobooks on Audible.

Audible is an Amazon company, and you can buy Audible books individually on Amazon, then listen to them in the free Audible app.

An Audible subscription gives you two main benefits:

  • A credit. Each month you get 1 credit in exchange for your monthly membership fee of $14.95. You can use this credit on anything you please. I like to use mine on audiobooks that would otherwise cost me more than the $14.95 subscription fee.
  • A 30% discount on other audiobooks. If you’re like me and you want to purchase more than one audiobook per month, you can do that at a discounted rate when you’re a paid subscriber.

That’s basically it. For me, it’s worth it. I save a boatload of money by making my expensive Audible purchases using my credits, and then I fill up my audiobook library by snagging deals and buying those a la carte (keep reading to find out more about that).

But you definitely don’t need to pay for an Audible subscription to get great books (and deals!) from Audible.

Here are some examples of the more expensive books I’ve used my Audible credits on:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
The Ramona Quimby Collection
The Henry Huggins Audio Collection
The Beverly Cleary Audio Collection
The Ralph S. Mouse Audio Collection
The Hobbit

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How to get Audible books without a subscription

Even without an Audible subscription, you can buy as many audiobooks as you’d like individually, by purchasing them on Amazon – although you must do this on your computer – not mobile.

On the following screenshot, I would select “buy with 1-click” to purchase the book. (You can get a free audiobook by signing up for a 30-day trial, though, so you could always do that first, then cancel. Just don’t forget to cancel if you don’t want to be charged in 30 days!)

Once you’ve purchased them, download the free Audible app on whichever device you’d like to listen to the book on – your phone, computer, tablet, or (some versions of) Kindle.

Log in to the app using your Amazon sign-in, and you’re good to go.


How to make sure you’re not getting charged the subscription fee

Worried that you might get charged that $15/month Audible subscription fee? Just check in your account there.

Go right here –> audible.com/account-details and manage your membership from there.

You’ll see if you’re going to be charged for a membership and can cancel that at any time. Even if you cancel your membership, you get to keep all of your Audible books (they’re YOURS, remember?) and can listen to them with the Audible app, even without a subscription.

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Does listening on my phone use data?

It depends. Downloading a book to your phone will use data if you aren’t hooked up to Wifi. But once the book is downloaded on your device, it won’t use data to play.

I always have whatever I’m currently listening to downloaded onto my phone, so that I can listen without using data.

To play only downloaded books in the Audible app, toggle to “Downloaded” at the top of your phone scree. These are the books that are downloaded to your device (they won’t use data when I listen to them.)

If you toggle to “All Titles” you can see all of the books in my account. You can click on any to automatically download one to your phone.

TIP: As soon as I’m done listening, I delete the book off my device.

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RAR Audiobook Favorites

Do we have any audiobooks to suggest? You bet we do! You can find a whole list here.

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How to listen to Audible books (with or without a subscription)

So you’ve grabbed an Audible deal and now you want to listen to it, right?

You need to download the free Audible app onto whichever device you’ll be listening on (your phone, tablet, kindle, or computer).

You can even download the app onto multiple devices, and Audible will keep the audiobooks synced up for you.

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How to play an audiobook for a family

I’m pretty low-tech, believe it or not, so when I’m playing audiobooks for multiple kids, sometimes I plop my phone into a glass cup and call it good. The cup really does amplify sound quite well!

We also bought one of these Sony Boomboxes, and I really love it. It plays both CD’s and connects to the Bluetooth on my phone (so we can listen to all those Audible books on it!)

I’m not sure why it has mediocre Amazon reviews – I’ve used mine for a year and still love it. Sometimes it goes on sale on Amazon (I bought it for $68.)

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Good times and places for audiobooks

Anywhere you please! We get this question a lot, so I’ll share a few places where we listen to audiobooks in my home:

  • At the table with coloring books/drawing/Lego/play dough, etc
  • During quiet time in their own bedrooms
  • In the car
  • With headphones, while doing chores (I love listening while I clean or make dinner)
  • While folding laundry (you just need a speaker or to use my glass cup trick to amplify sound – I get all my big kids to help with laundry doing this!)
  • During breakfast or lunch, to keep the squabbling to a minimum
  • Outside while doing yardwork
  • On the treadmill or when going for a walk

Sometimes we listen as a group; sometimes we listen on our own. We get in so much more reading than we would otherwise, though, by including audiobooks into our normal routines.

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