Best Audiobook subscriptions in Australia

It's no accident that Audible has been the English-speaking part of the internet’s premier supplier of audiobooks for about two decades. The service is owned and backed by Amazon, and while the details have changed over the past twenty years the business model remains both intact and intuitive.

You pay Audible a monthly fee in exchange for a credit that can be redeemed for any premium audiobook available on the service. Each month you stick with Audible, you get another credit.Once you’ve redeemed your monthly credit on an audiobook, you’re able to listen to and download it as many times as you want and will still have access to it even if you cancel your subscription later down the line.

Audiobooks bought via Audible can be listened to via the Audible app, which is available on both iOS and Android.

As for the size of the library, Audible currently offers around 400,000 titles to choose from. Most of these are in English, but the service does include a modest amount of French, Spanish and Chinese language titles. All told, this puts it about 100,000 titles ahead of its closest rival.

What's more, a not insignificant chunk of this library is also included in The Plus Catalogue. Accessible to active Audible members, The Plus Catalogue is a selection of Audible Originals, audiobooks and podcasts that cost nothing to download but can only be listened to by active Audible members.

This perk adds a clear bucket of extra value to the monthly subscription, and yet another reason to stick with the service. Some of the original titles here like It Burns, Riot Act and Nut Jobs are good enough that they almost justify the subscription cost associated with Audible on their own.

The final perk worth mentioning here is that Audible members sometimes get access to exclusive member-only deals, letting them save on individual audiobook purchases.

For audiobook lovers, Audible offers a great balance between value and quantity. The competition is fierce, but the market leader continues to packs a punch in terms of quality, quantity, and affordability. It's as close to the perfect deal as any heavy audiobook listener can get.

Scribd doesn't just provide access to ebooks; it also offers original podcasts, sheet music, graphic novels, magazines, and a huge selection of audiobooks. What's more, the audiobook library here rivals that of well-known subscription services such as Audible, with a vast selection of classics—the likes of Austen, Orwell, Dostoyevsky, and Tolkien—along with more modern titles like Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, All Systems Red by Martha Wells, and Rachel Hawkins' The Villa.

If you're unsure whether Scribd has enough audiobooks for you to want to stay with it after the 30-day free trial period has ended, you should have plenty of time during that period to explore the library and reach a decision.

At $13.99 per month, Scribd is pretty competitive in price. It's a few bucks cheaper than both Audible and Audiobooks.com, so those looking to listen to lots of audiobooks on a budget will be able to get more out of it for their money. The all-you-can-listen approach and the inclusion of both ebooks (accessible via an ereader or tablet) and audiobooks help Scribd's value for money across the line from excellent to exceptional.

The library isn't as vast or modern as Audible, nor is the ebook offering a match for Kindle Unlimited. That said, if you're to save money and listen to as many audiobooks as you want then there's nothing better.

Audiobooks.com checks many of the same boxes and meets most of the same needs that its biggest competitor does and, if you're sticking to the single credit plan, it doesn't cost a cent more.

The biggest advantages that this Audible alternative has are the fresh possibilities it incorporates. In addition to their standard allowance of credits, Audiobooks.com subscribers score a second book from this collection each month at no additional cost.

Audiobooks.com credits can also be traded in for access to one of the service's Audiobook Clubs rather than be redeemed for a single title of your choice. One credit gets you 30 days of all-you-can-hear access to every title included in the club. For those who like the idea of a more buffet-style approach to audiobooks, this setup might strike a chord.

Even if they're not going to be for everyone, the VIP Selection and Audiobooks.com's all-you-can-hear Clubs system represent intriguing possibilities that don't really have an equal within Amazon's own audiobook ecosystem.

The same praise can't quite be levied at the over app experience. If Audible is sometimes painfully streamlined, the main menu on the Audiobook.com app is bursting at the seams. There's podcast integration, access to clubs, dedicated note-taking, a dedicated recommendations queue and a shortcut to member-exclusive deals.

Audiobooks.com provides a great selection of titles for its monthly audio subscription, but it cannot match Audible in terms of app experience and the range of available books. Nevertheless, it's a clear front-runner as far as Audible alternatives go.

Audiobooks.com has almost as many titles to offer as Audible does and it puts a fresh spin on the formula that might appeal to those who struggle to settle on a single title each month.

Blinkist pitches itself as the Audible alternative for the time poor. While the subscription-based app does offer a number of traditional audiobooks as a in-app purchase, the main draw here is that you pay one simple monthly fee for your Blinkist subscription and get access to the knowledge contained in thousands audiobooks. There's no fussing around with credits, you just get access to everything the service has to offer (outside of traditional audiobooks, which cost extra).

The catch, if you want to call it that, is that you're not really paying for full-blown audiobooks but rather a playlist of episodic summaries called Blinks. Each Blink tends to be around 5 minutes long, but contain the big ideas of each text. For example, Hugh Eakin's Picasso's War is broken out into 7 Blinks that run for a total of 20 minutes.

It might be a little reductive to frame Blinkist as something like podcasts meet SparkNotes, but it wouldn't be far off. The appeal of the service is that you can get the gist of a given book without committing all the time it would take to fully read it.

For some, this shortcut might not sit well. For others, it might be just the thing. In either case, the Blinkist book list isn't hugely long and it is dominated by self-help texts above other genres. There's a little of variety here, but nothing as deep or diverse as the libraries found with services like Audible.

Whether or not Blinkist's approach to fast and easy audio learning sits well with you will a go long way towards winning you over on the subscription cost being worth it.

If being talked through the big ideas of a book appeals to you, then Blinkist is a solid execution on that proposition. What's here is good, but it's inevitably limited in both scope and depth. It's a good option if you want to learn a little bit about a lot of different things, but it's not likely to satisfy those with deeper audiobook appetites.