Julia Slaughter

I have been a fan of LibriVox’s website for years. I love having all of those “classic” books at my fingertips so I was thrilled to see that Librivox had an App on the App Store. I was so excited that I didn’t even mess with the free version – I went straight for the .99 app to make sure I had all of the features!

Just so we’re all clear – MOST of the negative reviews on the iTune App Store are people complaining that the selection of books isn’t up to snuff. (I saw one review actually mention a “wish list” of authors they wanted to see – Grisham, the Harry Potter books, etc.) Librivox can only offer FREE audio books because the books on the website are no longer covered by copyright protection, they are part of the public domain. If a book is protected by copyright then you have to pay to use any part of it – even to read it out-loud. (Obviously Mr.Grisham wants to sell his audiobook not give it away here.)

There are two versions of this app – the free version only allows you to stream the audio books while the .99 cent version allows you to download books to play even without an Internet connection. As I mentioned I downloaded the paid variety right out of the gate.

Basically this app is a download manager and a player.  I love the flexibility it offers you when you’re searching – you can search not only by author and title, but narrator which is great since there are some really talented narrators out there. However, the player leaves a little to be desired – see I haven’t found any functionality in the Audiobooks player that makes it better than just using the iPod feature on my iPhone. In fact I find it frustrating that when I want to read a text or use any other iPhone features, the story stops completely.

Now if I could use the Audiobooks to manage my Librivox downloads – I would’ve considered that worth the dollar even if I did play the books through my iPod but here’s the rub – it stores them some place that I can’t seem to find them so if I download through the Audiobooks app, I have to listen to them through the Audiobooks app which means I am out a dollar and back where I started – downloading my audiobooks from the Librivox website and enjoying them through my iPod!