The Complete Guide To Listening To Audiobooks on Android

I love listening to audiobooks when I’m cycling, commuting, or just doing chores. And it’s easy to see why. I can complete a book within a week or two, while fulfilling other tasks. That’s a novel of 300+ pages I would normally have to dedicate close to a dozen hours of my life to.

Granted, the experience of reading a book, no matter if you prefer a hard copy or an E-ink display Kindle is quite different. And when it comes to books like The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, I tend to agree with the die-hard readers. But there are a lot of mystery, young adult, and even educational books out there that you can enjoy as audiobooks. Go ahead, steal a couple hours of time from the universe.

Audiobooks are not music tracks. You measure them in hours, not minutes. Audiobooks are usually about 10 hours long and are broken down in 30–50 chapters of 15–30 minutes each. They also take a toll on your memory and bandwidth, easily stretching from 200 MB to well over 1 GB.

Why you need a dedicated audiobook app:
– Easily navigate between hundreds of chapter files and multiple books
– Have all your books arranged logically
– Resume a book from where you left off

How do you download them? What are the best ways to do so legally? And once you’ve started listening, how do you make sure your book will resume from the same place you left off? Worry not, my travels in the audiobook world have equipped me with all these answers. And I’ll gladly tell you about them.

But First, Let’s Download An Audiobook

• Open Culture has a selection of 550 free audiobooks that you’ll actually want to listen to, ready to go in MP3 format.
• LibriVox is the Project Gutenberg of audiobooks. It’s where all the free audiobook apps get the good stuff from. You can download ebooks from the website directly and then transfer them to your Android phone as and when you like.
• Guiding Tech has made a list of top 10 places you can get free audiobooks from.

How To Copy Audiobooks To Android

Now that you’ve downloaded a couple of audiobooks, make sure there’s only one audiobook (including all the chapters) in one folder.

Next, connect your Android phone and make sure it’s discoverable by your PC. Go to the phone drive on your PC and create a new folder called Audiobooks. Paste all ebook files here.

It’s important to keep different books in different subfolders because the app we’ll be using can be assigned to one folder, which acts as an audiobook directory. This way neither the app nor you will get confused.

Listening With Smart AudioBook Player

When it comes to listening to audiobooks on Android, Smart AudioBook Player is it. If you’ve copied in the books as stated in the step above, you’re good to go. Just tell the app which folder they are stored in and it will take care of the rest.

The app shows the book metadata and details like how long the whole book is alongside the current chapter. You can add bookmarks (really helpful) and details about characters you want to remember in real time. There’s also a sleep timer, lockscreen buttons, and a playback speed option.

Just like any other good audiobook app, it remembers where you paused, so even if you come back days later it will pick up where you left off. A normal music player just takes you back to the beginning of the track (chapter).

The app is free to download and you get a 30-day trial of the full version, which is a $2 upgrade. For that you get playback speed control, character lists, bookmarks, lockscreen controls, cover search and a lot more.

Even after the 30-day trial ends, if you don’t choose to make the $2 purchase, the app won’t be unusable. The basic functions of identifying audiobook files, creating libraries, and remembering the pause points will work just fine.

LibriVox Audio Books Free

LibriVox Audio Books is a basic audiobook app for Android. You don’t get a lot of bells and whistles but you can still expect a solid audiobook listening experience.

If you want a plug-and-play audiobook experience that puts more than 15,000 free titles under your thumb, try this app. Just search, start playing, and that’s it.

Happy Listening

How are you going to use this new found medium for consuming books? Let us know in the comments below.