Audiobooks on my phone

There are some interesting logistics to listening to audiobooks on my phone. I have an Audible Plus subscription, and some books are included in this subscription as “AYCL” titles – you can stream them, but they cannot be downloaded. I also have normal audiobooks, and they can only be downloaded.

I like variety; with audiobooks as with text, I alternate between many different books at once. So I want to download as many audiobooks as I can, to have them at the ready. At the same time, space on my phone is limited, so I want to listen to downloaded books as soon as possible, so I can delete the files after listening and free up space. On the other hand, I also want to listen to AYCL books as much as possible, too, since I can only listen to them while connected, and I can not listen to them if I ever stop paying for an Audible Plus subscription, which I think I would want to do at some point.

There is also the fact that, out of the audiobooks that are downloaded, some of them must be kept downloaded entire, while others can be downloaded in several small parts (usually chapters or sections); it makes sense to want to get through the biggest files first, which means a keener focus on the audiobooks which I downloaded whole.

It’s a weird balancing act. I don’t have a formula for it or anything; the next thing to listen to is usually determined more by my mood than by any of these considerations, since being able to work with how I’m feeling at the moment is the greatest advantage of keeping many different books in the first place. But these things do matter to some extent, and I feel it is a strange and unique experience which I ought to keep recorded. The main result seems to be that I focus more on downloaded books when the “low on space” warning is flashing at me.

Update (2022-06-02): This blog post is now outdated, because Audible Plus subscribers can listen to their purchased audiobooks without downloading them. I have not retracted it because what I said pretty much still holds.