We love listening to audio books as we drive. We’ve worked our way through the Percy Jackson Series, the Enchanted Forest Series, and now we are on book 4 of the Heroes of Olympus. Even though we don’t drive 10 hours days (ever) listening to a book is an easy way to keep kids entertained on a 30 minute or even 3 hour drive.
Many audio books are available through library overdrive systems. We’ve checked out the Enchated Forest series and downloaded to my phone through the Android app. The Percy Jackson books are harder to come by as they are pretty popular. Sometimes we’ve had to wait weeks for the next book and then everyone gets impatient and cranky.
Of course, the audio books are available on Audible.com as well, but I just can’t justify throwing $30 at an audio book. It is just too much for me. Even with a membership, we’d still be paying $14.95 per month for one audio book. Still can’t do it, even after that first free book.
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My solution to this problem turned out to be pretty simple. One day while I was browsing Amazon, I noticed the “Whispersync for Voice” little box underneath the title and prices. It states that you can switch back and forth between the Kindle book and listening to the professional Audible narration. You can even add the narration for a REDUCED PRICE once you buy the kindle book.
Genius.
Kindle Book: $7.57
Add Audio: $12.99
Total: $20.56
Audible Book Alone: $35.93
I get the Kindle book AND the audio book for less than the audio costs on Audible. Sometimes it even takes us more than month to go through a book, so with a membership we’d have them stacked up for months. My kids love to go back and read the books after we’ve listened anyway (I swear Andrew has read Sea of Monsters at least four times) so its a win-win.
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When you add the audio on Amazon, the books appear in the Audible app on my phone. It is super easy to see what we’ve purchased, download to my phone and then plug into to our car stereo and listen as we drive! Super easy. As you can see in my screenshot, it’s October and we’ve only bought 4 audio books this year total. Not 10 like we’d get with a membership. Maybe that number will change as we keep traveling, but for now this systems is working great!
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Do you have favorite audio books for kids? Let me know what they are! We are always looking for recommendations!
Have you guys checked out Libravox? It takes a bit of exploration to find titles and then get used to some of the (non-professional) readers – but we’ve been mining their library for a couple of years. More for MsBoyink and I to fall asleep to at night. But they have some Nesbitt, Prisoner of Zenda, the Greek Classics, etc.
We haven’t but I will! Really the only time we listen is when we are all in the car driving so they have to be pretty entertaining for the kids. We tried a version of Charlotte’s Web once that didn’t go over so well. 🙂
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