Audio News 2024 - Mini Episode

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[00:00:00] Welcome to the What to Read Next podcast. I am so excited to have you back. And I have to tell you, we're sort of going on hiatus. I may be dropping episodes, but I'm not fully committed right now for the next couple months, because I'll be traveling.

And I have a couple things are happening in my life. , it should be back and ready to go in February 2025. That's probably my expected date. But I may be dropping episodes from my live show from Novel Nights that I do every Thursday night at 7 p. m Eastern Standard Time on YouTube and Facebook.

So you can catch the replays on my YouTube channel which if you search What to Read Next Podcast, all author interviews are available on YouTube as well as, this live stream that happens every Thursday night. So there's plenty of opportunities to get to know if you want to get updates book recommendations if you're looking for what other authors recommend and what books to you want to read for the time.

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In this episode, I have a short quick book tea news episode of Things are happening with audio book world.

So we have changes in the Everand and Scribd that are happening this January, as well as a new alternative for, um, for you music streaming. So if you're Spotify listener and you want to get access to audible, you may want to switch over to Amazon music. So I'll tell you all about the tea about that. It's a short episode.

This was originally recorded. As part of Novel Nights. , again, every Thursday night at 7:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, or 4:00 PM Pacific Standard time or whatever time change you are.

All right, let's get to the audio news. Bye.

[00:01:51] Restream recording Dec 06, 2024 • 12:03:46 AM: We want to talk about a little book news. We have one big thing, audio book news. I'm going to throw it to Francesca to tell us about Everand and their [00:02:00] changes. Fran, what is going on?

Yeah. So actually the big change that we learned about recently is that Everand is changing their pricing basically. And Everand, if you don't know about it, it's a service where you can listen to audio books. It's always been a service where you pay one monthly fee and you can listen to.

Any audio book basically unlimited within their catalog. Now there are some caveats to that. It's not 100 percent unlimited. They do kind of limit what you can access. And sometimes it's invasive publishers. There's no real transparency as to how they do it. But if you have a vast amount of books saved that you want to listen to, you pretty much can listen to an unlimited number of books.

And that's always been the biggest selling point. It used to be 11. 99 and you can listen unlimited. Now you're not buying the books. It's kind of like Kindle limited where you're borrowing the books and returning them kind of thing. And it's always been something that I've [00:03:00] always found a lot of great books on there.

And sometimes even like really great new releases can be on there available. So I think that there's been a lot of fans of the service because of that. And they changed their pricing structure. They've had a lot of I guess they call it feedback on the fact that there's no transparency on how they limit the number of books that people are able to listen to.

And their way of fixing that was to change their pricing structure to now charge. Basically, you're getting like credits and it will work almost like audible, but you're not buying the book. So you're still paying to borrow, but you're only basically going to be getting like the equivalent of listening to one book because you're.

paying that money to unlock credits and those credits will then allow you to unlock books. So I feel like in my opinion, at least, so my controversial opinion, I don't know if you could [00:04:00] call it is it feels like they're trying to go to a model that feels very much like audible, but if I'm going to pay 11.

99 to 16. 99, I would much rather just own the audiobook so you could go to Audible or Libro FM or any other service and just buy that credit and buy the book. So then you have it to re listen anytime you want. So I'm not really sure how well that's going to go for them, but according to them, it was in response to the lack of transparency.

And being able to give people access to the whole catalog, you would just buy however many credits you want to unlock however many audio books you want for the month. So I guess they feel that was a good solution to the problem. In my opinion, Not really, because I would much rather have that unlimited ability, and if I get stopped from listening a particular author, a particular series, or however they do it, I was fine with it because I have so many other books that I can [00:05:00] listen to.

So, I don't know. That's how I feel about it, but I feel like it's a little bit of a controversial take for them to completely switch gears. On how they're selling their service because it's going completely away from what they were really about. So, right, right. No, that makes absolute sense. So audio book folks, let us know in the comments, what are your thoughts on these changes?

I mean, do you use that platform? Regardless, we'd love to hear from you, replay crew. We'd love to hear from you too. But Laura, there's also changes with Amazon music. Tell us about it. Yeah, so Amazon Music is trying to compete with Spotify. As if you may be aware, if you're a Spotify premium user, Spotify allows you to listen to 15 hours of an audio book per month while you're active.

And it only works for, if you're in a family Spotify, it only works for the household owner. So they're the ones who get the access to us. And it's by hours. It's not listened for. It's not, it's actually hours of the actual [00:06:00] book. So Amazon's like, you know what? We're in the game. We have music.

We're trying to compete them. They're very aggressive of the Amazon Music Library. And they're like, you know what? We're going to do the same thing. But we got Audible as far as suite of services. So we're going to give you. One title of audible you can borrow per month. We're not going to limit how long the audiobook is It's just one title audible so you can listen to that month that title And then every month that you have an option to change your title so you can continue to listen to the title until the way through if you Miss that month or you can just change the title every month and you have like one title so it actually has access to if you're not aware audible actually has a lot of like, You Exclusive titles are only available in Audible because of royalties, because Audible audiobooks are really expensive to make, so they give a good royalty matchup.

So you'll get access to those Audible originals that you chances are you may not be able to afford. You might not be able to find them in a library. So if [00:07:00] you're a Spotify user and you want to switch over to Amazon music, they're having a deal It I would suggest try the deal, if you don't like it go back wait six months get another deal That's the best way to approach a lot of these amazon products same goes for audible same goes kindle limited just try it Wait six months, get the new deal for 99 cents.

So right now I think they're offering free for the first three months. And then you just like have to pay 11. 99. So it's still cheaper than a credit. You don't own the title, but if you're one of those listeners like myself, who just listens once and won't go back to it, this is a great add on service along with the catalog music.

So if you're a musical listener. You may not get your Spotify wrapped up, but this is just another catalog of service. And maybe they'll compete with you because I know YouTube does a wrap up. So I'm assuming they'll do the wrap, wrap up music too. So, yeah, that's awesome to hear. I mean, so folks, if you are into audio books, it's really good information.

So at least now, what's happening what's [00:08:00] going on you can make decisions and make choices, from there as well bye, everyone. Bye!