Audible App for iPhone Great. But, Plan for Lots of Time to Download Audio Books

Audible’s recently released apps for Android and iPhone are great. One of advantages of using these apps instead of, for the iPhone, iTunes is that the apps let you download audio books directly to your phone. This means you don’t need to connect your phone to a computer with a USB cable just to move an audio book over. One scenario that may come to mind after learning about this feature is buying a book from Audible, downloading it it to your phone and dashing off to the airport. Or, you might even have visions of downloading it at an airport just before boarding.

There is one little problem with this fanciful vision, however: Audio book files are big. A 7 hour 27 minute long Audible book that I just bought is, as you can see in the screenshot above, 205MB large. It took a bit over a half-hour to download over a reasonably good WiFi connection. It is not unsual to find much longer audio books in the 15 to 30 hour long range. You can image how large these files are. Long audio books tend to be distributed in multiple parts. So, it is possible to download the first part for the trip out and the second part for the trip back

The lesson here is: Be sure you have enough time, a reasonably fast WiFi connection and a lot of battery power (or an AC adapter) before you start downloading.

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