Hey there do it yourself technicians. Today I want to talk about one of my favourite apps, Audible, the app for listening to books and podcasts. As a kid I grew up a lot travelling in the car and even back in those days in the late 70s early 80s we were listening to audiobooks. This is one of dads that I somehow ended up with in my collection now. It's a book on tape. Maxwell Maltz's Psycho-Symanetics, a really wonderful study of the brain and how people think and psychology performance that sort of thing. My dad loved this and I actually loved this. Over the years I've listened to hundreds of books on CD and tape, mostly driving in the car, driving to work, that sort of thing. Occasionally just you know figure up in the hammock chilling out. But then sometime in maybe the mid 2000s I discovered Audible. An app where I could download my favourite books and listen to them on the go. I mean I've always got my phone with me so why not listen to a book on my phone. It makes perfect sense. Over the years I've done all sorts of things, had speakers in the car, wired my phone into the car sound system. These days it's just easy. It just blew to its straight to the car and when I'm in I hit play in my book starts and off I go travelling to work wherever I'm listening to my book. Last year I did a road trip where I drove to a school reunion up in Pompacore, which was about 18 hours each way and pretty much managed to get two and a bit books in in that trip. One of them was a fiction book called Delta V and other was Michelle Obama's Becoming. Two wildly different books but both really enjoyable and it certainly made the kilometres fly by. The app itself has evolved and improved a lot over the years. They keep lots of stats for you of how much you've listened and they have badges for doing various things like finishing five books and rereading the same book twice that sort of thing. Unfortunately sometime last year I lost all of my stats when I moved from audible.com to audible.com.au mostly for better pricing on from Australia. I've signed up with a one book a month which costs me about $16 a month I think. I get a free credit every month which I can choose to use on any book I like. They also have had a promo recently where they're giving away a specific book free every month on top of that. Some of those have been quite interesting as well. You can see here I actually have four credits up I sleeve at the moment so I need to choose a few good books to listen to. That's said at the moment because I'm not driving to work. We're stuck in stage four restrictions here at the moment. I'm not listening as much as I was. Between working on this YouTube channel my real job and trying to do a few things around the house I don't actually seem to have any more free time than I usually do despite losing an hour and a half of commuting a day but it's early days and I'm sure that will settle down. My library has 134 different titles in it. Mostly psychology, personal development and a heck of a lot of science fiction and fantasy. Books range in length from only a few dozen minutes to I think my longest book might be in the realm of 48 hours long and that took me weeks months to get through. I really love the variety of books that they have. They must have hundreds of thousands of books in their library to choose from. In 2008, Audible was acquired by Amazon and it seems to have just gone from strength to strength since then with the backing of a larger company. The standard interface for listening is quite useful. There's the play button. You can skip back 15 minutes, skip forward 15 minutes, connect it immediately to a device. You can choose your playback speed in all sorts of increments from one times all the way through two, three and a half times. I do tend to listen to my books at somewhere around one and a half to two times depending on the type of book what I'm doing at the time. It just varies and sometimes I find I can take more in, sometimes I find I can't. It also of course depends on the narrator. Many books you can jump backwards and forwards for the chapters. You can set a sleep timer which allows you to play the book as you go to sleep and then it will turn the audio off after a period of time that you select. I personally don't like this because I want to make sure I get everything out of a book and don't want to miss anything. You can also bookmark a clip down in the bottom right corner if you go, that was interesting. You hit the button and it actually records a section of the video and you can take a note yourself as well. The other view is Carview which if you've got your phone mounted up is really handy. You can play pause, go back 15 seconds and bookmark a clip as well. Big buttons that you can touch easily which is no more or less safe than changing the volume of the radio in the car. How legal it is will depend on where you live and drive. This book I've got here is teaching me about YouTube which is slightly ironic considering this video but it's a very enjoyable book. If you want to buy this or any other book there's a link up here to Audible where you can get a free book and a 30 day trial of the app. There's also a heap of podcasts and other materials available in the app. I've listed two of few podcasts this way and that's been pretty good too. Question of the day, have you tried an audiobook? Do you think you'll give it a try? 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