I have been an avid audible.com supporter for well over a year. I’ve been patient with the horrendous website. I bought numerous subscriptions for others last holiday season. But i’m bloody fed up and frustrated with them. It’s impossible to navigate the system. When i was traveling, i found that i couldn’t get audible to download. Now that time has passed, my subscription doesn’t roll over and so i lost a month worth of downloads. This has happened plenty before and i’m just tired of it. I have patience for wacky interfaces at the beginning, but not over time and not when i feel like i’m getting screwed out of money while they fuck around. Frustration.
Have you ever tried “My Library”?
Get used to it.. I’ve been grousing about how painful the experience of using Audible is since I signed up in March 2000 and things still haven’t improved.
Why? Because you’re looking at a basic lack of competition. It’s clear that Audible.com puts almost zero resources into interaction design and it shows… and why should they when they’ve landed exclusive digital-audiobook-distributor arrangements with most of the major publishers? And now with NPR and so on…
I love audiobooks and spoken word files; that’s why I’ve been a loyal monthly Audible subscriber for nearly 5 years. I just hate dealing with this enormously cumbersome middleman called audible.com…
[ correction: I’m -assuming- Audible has exclusive arrangements with most of the major publishers; I don’t know that for a fact. ]
How the hell do you cancel your account with them? I’m getting billed twice a month and I don’t even use their crappy service.
someone please bomb that place.
Just bought a 9.95 promo download. What a piece of crap downloader, piece of crap player which does not play and generates a stupid error message with no message, All their whining about not converting to MP3’s to protect the authors, blah, blah, blah; no mp3’s; no business. So what is left to protect if the service chokes out the client. What a piece of crap. Screw you worthless piles of crap.
yeah i hate these people. So i get this mp3 player rightand in the box is a card for 3 free Audible programs. All you have to do is make an account and pick your programs. Wrong, as soon as your done with your account and you search the site for programs, they “lose” your credits so you get nothing. Then they ask you if you like it so much you would like to become a fulltime member. SCREW THAT
I thought the new beta.com would be an improvement, but they actually just told me they FORGOT to built the part that lets existing subscribers continue to download their subscriptions in the right format for their portable device. And they acted like I was strange for being incredulous that they would JUST PLAIN FORGET to build the part of the user interface that lets an AudibleManger 4.0 users continue downloading without interuption.
To paraphrase their helpful instructions…
“All you have to do is uninstall Audible Manager and Audible Player, Download and reinstall Audible Manger 5.0, Audible Player, and the new Audible Download Manager, go to our web-site, select podcasting, get your RSS URL, paste it in when prompted durring installation, and then download all your files again.”
GOSH I HATE THIS COMPANY! Once I was on hold for 4 hours (I kid you not, 4 hours) because the message on their tech support said “Your call is important and will be answered in the order it was received”. Then the next day I came to find out that they were closed and just forgot to change the message on their phone system. SO IRRITATING!!!
I bought an MP3 player that was more expensive because they gave 3 free audible downloads. I found the card for the downloads and followed the instructions. I found out that you had to spend money to get the 3 free downloads.
It seems as though a lot of people are frustrated or disinterested enough to bail out of audible.com lately. There is a post showing their drop in web traffic and their drop in stock price on the Compete.com blog today. It’s worth checking out… http://blog.compete.com/2007/01/17/audible/