[resdev]

Love librivox.

Couple of tips:

1) atleast in United States you can use Libby app with a valid library card for non public domain audiobooks. However Wait times are going to be in pain.

2) I’ve created an iOS app based on librivox with additional functionalities like saving history, ease of use, sleep timers, offline , speed etc.,

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/librivox-audiobooks-zlibrary/i...

[prepend]

Thanks for making this app and it saves a few steps from downloading the books directly and playing them through Dropbox or some other app that plays mps3.

I don’t understand the subscription angle from a user standpoint. Why is this $10/year? There’s no per user costs for you. I wanted to purchase the app as its quite convenient, but having a subscription for what I expect to use for the rest of my life doesn’t seem wise to me.

Also coupled with the fact that I have a family so I’d need to pay $50/year just to listen to free librevox recordings.

[resdev]

Thanks for your reply.

Just wanted to clarify couple of points before explaining the $10/year for premium subscription for the app.

1) In iOS, there is a perk that developers can enable where if someone has a subscription for the app, the family members in iCloud settings (upto 6) are also automatically included with no additional cost. Many apps don't enable it though, but I've enabled it for all my apps since the day I introduced pricing.

2) The app itself is free, adhering to public domain ethos, even without the premium subscription there is no blocker to listen to thousands of books. I've included all the popular books, and in addition to the home page, explore section where you can filter by tags, languages will also enable anyone to listen with no ads or whatsoever. I'll explain more below regarding why I had to include $10 and some technical aspects.

In order to have seamless ux, I had to create and maintain a database and api with data which incur some cost but not earth shattering. The original problem I had with librivox is that there's a lot of metadata like description that's not searchable and if someone wants to read a book on a topic or keyword that's hidden deep inside description, it won't be shown on the website.

In order to solve this issue, I've created a service similar to elastic search, which proven to useful but a bit costly at the level where it means that I have to shut down the app in the long run.

So unhappily I introduced premium subscription that enables this feature. My plan was to introduce more features like importing audiobooks etc., however last time checked this app is not in breakeven range regarding the cost, so at the moment I'm focusing on other projects. Less than 0.01% buy the subscription which is not great but that at least reduce the risk of me incurring huge loss. The current state is that I do not want to take down the app for a simple reason that I've spent quite a bit time developing it, a lot of free users are still using it and leaving the door open for future if it at least gets in breakeven zone, so currently just doing minimal maintenance and fixing bugs if any occasionally.

A tip that I can share at my expense is that, even if you don't want to pay $10/year but want to use the advanced search, you can start the free trial that lasts for 7 days, just listen for few moments and download those keyword targeted audiobooks, so that they stay in your history. So even when you cancel the free trial, you can still enjoy your targeted audiobooks and thousands of books shown in home and explore screen. You have to cancel the trial before end of 6th day though.

[prepend]

Thanks for the note and these seem like understandable reasons.

I would have paid a one time fee just to “reward” you. Instead I downloaded the LibriVox app (free but with ads or subscription) that has a much more advanced UI. And then I just downloaded VLC and search and download directly from librevox.org. Comically, this works best on my iPhone and I’m again grateful for VLC and the great open source/free work they do.

I’ve always released under Apache/BSD/MIT to explicitly allow others to commercialize, if they want. So I’m just criticizing, just lamenting the fewer purchase offerings and more needless (to me) saas offerings. If the product doesn’t provide some ongoing improvement, then I don’t want saas. Storing books and usage data on my device is not a useful saas service. I’m still butthurt over paying $60 to ynab for them to switch to a crappier version of saas that provides less functionality.

[resdev]

Glad it worked for you.

[FireBy2024]

I read somewhere that libraries pay a decent amount to the publishers for every audiobook borrowed through Libby. So I always try to make sure the book interests me and will actually listen to it once borrowed.

[jszymborski]

> atleast in United States

Is working in Quebec, Canada as well.