eBooks, audiobooks, podcast, magazines, and sheet music have moved to Everand. And Epubor Everand Downloader can help you remove DRM from your Everand ebooks, sheet music, and audiobooks.
Audiobooks are so popular now — as they’re easy to listen to, whenever, wherever. And I get a lot of questions from our customer about whether Epubor Audible Converter can convert Scribd Audiobooks. So I thought it might be helpful to write an article comparing these two major Audiobook services -- Scribd vs Audible. Which one is best for you?
About Scribd and Audible
What is Scribd?
Scribd, founded in 2007, is an American e-book, magazine and audiobook subscription service that includes one million titles. Besides this, Scribd also hosts 60 million documents on its open publishing platform.
What is Audible?
Audible, founded in 1995 and acquired by Amazon in 2008, is the world's largest producer of Audiobooks. Their unmatched selection includes the world's largest library of audiobooks, plus original audio shows and audio subscriptions to your favorite magazines and newspapers.
Scribd vs Audible
1Scribd vs Audible: Selection of books
Scribd is a modern solution for reading lovers which lets them access million of e-books, audiobooks, magazines, music. Articles from such popular periodicals like Bloomberg Businessweek, Time Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, New York Magazine are available for Scribd users. All the content after getting premium membership will be unlimited to read, listen and download.
Audible has the world's largest library of Audiobooks, which features over 425,000 Audiobooks. Given it is a subsidiary of Amazon, we only expect that number to grow. Members gain access to an extensive collection of audio shows. The Audible membership also includes audio news via the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and additional publications. What’s more, Audible has a program called Audible Originals. These are audio-books created exclusively for Audible by authors and not available elsewhere.
In a word, there are many Audiobooks that you can‘t find on Scribd, but you can find them on Audible all the time.
2Scribd vs Audible: Cost comparison
Scribd members can read and listen with unlimited audiobooks, ebooks, and magazines, available anytime and on any device for only $8.99 USD a month.
Audible offers 30 days of membership free, plus 2 audiobooks and 2 Audible Originals to get you started. After trial, you’ll get 1 credit and 3 titles each month for your $14.95 subscription: 1 audiobook and 2 Audible Originals of your choice.
3Scribd vs Audible: Sound quality
Audible has noticeably better audio quality than Scribd. Scribd audiobooks are limited to 32kbps. In comparison, Audible offers 32 kbps as the standard option and 64 kbps as the high quality sound.
As larger audiobooks are usually 10 hours long, a high bitrate audio file would occupy more space. However, 32kbps is inadequate for audiobook recordings. That's why Scribd Audiobooks just don’t sound that great. But Audible’s higher quality 64 kbps files are super clear.
4Scribd vs Audible: Ownership of Audiobooks
One major downside for Scribd is that you don’t own the audiobooks you listen to. If you ever quit your Scribd membership, you don’t get to access those titles anymore. With Audible, if you cancel your Audible membership, your audiobooks are yours to keep forever. If you have a family membership, you can share the audiobooks with each other to save money while still owning the books!
5Scribd vs Audible: Which is better?
As always, it depends on your needs. Both have their advantages and drawbacks. By comparing these two services, we can make two basic conclusions for you:
If you like reading and listening to a lot of books, it is better to buy an unlimited subscription from Scribd, costing only $8.99.
If you are a voracious audiobook listener who only prefers listening to the books, Audible can better meet your demands.
Epubor Audible Converter can only decrypt and convert Audible books. For more details, you can read this step by step guide on how to convert Audible books to MP3. Once DRM has been removed from your Audible books, you can back up your Audible books to your local disk and share them with friends freely.
Amy Lopez crafts informative articles on eBooks and eReaders, uncovering optimal methods to enhance your eBook reading experience, and eagerly shares her findings with you.
Great article, I use Scribd, and I have noticed that the audio quality is not as good as Audible. Scribd's e-book platform on mobile is also not very good, as I have noticed that it freezes quite a bit; with that said, I believe you can still download e-books as pdf (I know you can download articles as pdf), and save them to your computer, then transfer them to a mobile device.
Another site that I use for audio content (although it really is video content) is The Great Courses. With The Great Courses Plus, you can access most of the lectures via a computer or mobile device. You can download lectures to your mobile device and watch/listen to them without an active connection. At this point in time, I think you have to download/stream the video, but they have an option to turn off the video portion and only play the audio portion, to allow you to use background play. At the time I'm writing this, I believe The Great Courses Plus subscription is $15/month.