Playster Vs Audible Vs Audiobooks.com

You only ever hear of Audible when people talk about legal audiobooks online. I was going to get the three month trial membership but the deal expired before I finally decided to get it so I started to look for other options. The three options I found are the following:

• Audible (obviously). $16.45/month, credit card only (no PayPal). One book per month. 200,000+ books. Free trial lets you listen to a whole book.

• Audiobooks.com. $14.95/month, PayPal accepted. One book per month. 125,000+ books. Free trial lets you listen to a whole book. App lets you skip forward or backwards by 30 seconds.

• Playster.com, US $6.95/month, credit card only (no PayPal). Unlimited books each month. 100,000+ books. Free trial only lets you listen to as many first-halves as you want (have to start real membership for second half). Haven't tried signing in from multiple devices. App only lets you skip forward and backward to the previous or next chapter which could be a few minutes.

With Playster.com, I found the site harder to navigate than the other two but here is a link to the search page if you want to see what they have: https://play.playster.com/audiobooks/overview.

So anyway, looks like there's no reason to ever sign up to Audible unless they have a book that the other services don't (since it has a bigger range). And even then you'd just do a free trial to listen to that book, then cancel.

I did the Audiobooks.com free trial (since it had PayPal and Audible didn't) and cancelled after I finished the book I was reading to in 3 days (one a month, for $15, is kind of ridiculous), then tried a Playster one to read the next one in the series (and found they don't let you read the second half of books!! Sneaky buggers) so decided to concede to their tricky tactics and sign up for real $. I'd never really ever listened to an audiobook before, but it was really handy when my car was unavailable and I was on the bus 1.5 hours each way to work for two days. Makes the time fly by and you don't have to be looking up every other sentence to make sure you don't miss the bus coming, or miss your stop.

Does anyone have anything else to add? I will update this post with any extra features or facts people uncover.

***Edit: I was in the middle of listening to Divergent by Veronica Roth (was up to about the 1-2 hour mark) and then when I went to continue it one night, it was gone from the app, as well as the other books in the series. I asked support about it, but they were completely vague and unhelpful. There was something on the site that said if you consumed a lot then you would see less books. I asked the support person if that was the case but they were just wishy-washy and wouldn't give me any kind of answer. If I view the link in a private browsing session I can see it here, so obviously they are just preventing me from reading it (link shows as 404 not found in a normal browsing session). While the back-and-forth with the support person was going on I found it from another source, expecting there was just a mistake and it and the other books in the trilogy would reappear and I'd be able to listen to them later. But nope. I asked for a refund for my last month and cancelled the service.

I don't know if I want to recommend them now, because they were so annoying to deal with. Apart from being able to skip back or forwards by 30 seconds, there's no benefit to the app compared to listening to a downloaded chapterised version (where each chapter is a new track). And the app is more annoying because you have to wait 10-30 seconds for each menu to load before you can start listening. Since you'll have to get some books from "other" sources anyway, I think I would recommend just doing that and not paying for any service at all, and moving them to your phone with iTunes or GoodReader (I love GoodReader), or using an app provided by your library to borrow them. Playster was supposed to be paying for convenience, like Netflix et al is for TV shows. But it isn't convenient after all.