I’m at a point in my life where I don’t listen to music on my phone anymore. I still listen to light/classical music when I write, but when I’m out of the house, exercising, biking, or even doing housework, I listen to podcasts or audiobooks. I know audiobooks aren’t as engaging as actually reading a book with a physical page or a web page but most of the day I cycle/exercise for an hour at night. I can finish a book in a week or two while I’m burning calories. That means I’m stealing more time from the universe, and I love that.
But as you can imagine, the process of downloading and playing audiobooks on your phone is not easy. You could use a service like Audible but it doesn’t have everything and I don’t want to pay $15 for an audiobook.
So, I often listen to the free books that are not copyrighted by the wonderful volunteers at LibriVox. They have a collection of over 15,000 books, and I have plenty of classics to dig through (I’m only halfway through Crime and Punishment, but that was two years ago).
Why do you even need an AudioBook app?
In short:– To easily navigate between hundreds of chapter files and multiple books– To organize all your books logically– To resume a book from where you left off
Let’s talk about the actual process of listening to an audiobook. If you’re going to use the default music player on your iPhone, let me stop you right there. Experience is a lot. Audiobooks are usually divided into 30–50 chapters, each about 30 minutes, and navigating/finding is a nightmare. Continuing to read a 10-hour book half a chapter in a regular music player is impossible.
Just like you use a podcast-specific app, you’ll need an Audiobook-specific app. I have two apps for your iPhone and iPad. A free app for downloading/streaming free books and a paid app with a free link for those who want to do some serious reading.
Pro Tip: Listening to audiobooks while on the road or at the gym is a rewarding and relaxing way to multi-task.
Download audiobook
If you want to download/collect audiobooks on your PC first and then transfer them to your phone when needed, check out the links below.
- The guys at Open Culture have put together a list of 550 audiobooks you really want to listen to. They are downloadable as MP3s or as iTunes podcasts (US only).
- LibriVox, where the apps listed below get free audiobooks have a website for direct download.
- Guiding Tech has compiled a list of the top 10 places where you can get free audiobooks.
Transfer them to iPhone/iPad
So you’ve downloaded the audiobook. How do you get them on your iPhone or iPad? It is not as difficult as it seems. First, you need to download an app to play the audiobook; the best one is Bookmobile (more on that below). After installing the app, connect your device to your PC and launch iTunes.
From your device dashboard, go to application.
Scroll down Installed Apps section and click book cart. From the right panel select Add.
From the file selection menu, select all chapters of the book you want and import them. You can do the same for multiple books, don’t worry about cluttering them up.
Once they’re copied, sync and you’re done. See the Bookmobile section below to view, organize and use audiobooks with this app.
Audiobook app for free download and streaming
I’m a fan of David Smith’s Audio Books (or underline David Smith as he knows to some) about 6 months now but its recent iOS 7 update has made it much better. It’s easier to navigate and stupidly simple to use.
Just browse for a book, tap it, and it starts playing instantly. And while you are listening, the book is being downloaded in the background. This is important because audiobooks are very heavy – from 200 MB to almost 1 GB.
The app is free to start but you can pay to remove ads and there is a premium upgrade as well. I found the free app to be more than enough for my LibriVox needs. The app also lists great/classic audiobooks that are not available in the Librevox library but can be purchased relatively cheaply – under $5.
This app also has sleep timer and voice rate support. And yes, the app starts playing queued audiobooks as soon as you launch the app (stupidly simple, like I said).
From settings, you can toggle options to always resume playback and download at launch, download only over Wi-Fi, or always stream (useful if you’re running low on space on your iPhone).
Bookmobile for iPhone and iPad
Bookmobile is the father of audiobook apps for iOS. Not only does it play free LibriVox books, but you can also throw any DRM-free or DRM-protected Audible/iTunes audio file in it without worrying about playback. The free app lets you listen to 3 audiobooks for 60 days, and the unlimited upgrade costs just $2.99, well worth it if you ask me.
If you’ve already downloaded the audiobook on your PC, simply copy it into the app using iTunes as shown above. If you don’t want to do all that, you can also import audiobooks stored in Dropbox and it will manage and play back on its own.
The user interface, with its large buttons, hidden sidebar and double tap gesture for sleep timer, looks very bold. But that’s something you’ll have to get used to (as I did).
How to use Bookmobile
Once you’ve copied the audiobook files, it’s time to launch the app and tap + in the bottom options bar to create audiobooks (yes, you really need to create audiobooks from downloaded files).
This will tell you all the ways you can import audiobook files into the app.
Under More from iTunes Library title, you’ll find support for official iTunes audiobooks and those downloaded as podcasts. In the above exercise, we have manually pasted the audio files so we will choose Add iTunes Share File from the list.
Now, here you will see each file from every audiobook. If you’ve added several different audiobooks at once, just select files from one audiobook now and tap Create a new audiobook.
Name the book, add the author’s name, and you’re done.
If you have imported multiple books, follow the same steps, selecting the relevant audio files.
Video tutorial
Below is a video showing the process.
Go on, listen
Ok, I admit that it could be easier to import downloaded books to your iPhone, but it is so.
If you’re looking for a more plug-and-play approach, try the Audiobook app.
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
