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Audio Books
March 23rd, 2018
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I am a very active Audible user. I listen to a lot of audio books
and Amazon's service has the best selection at the cheapest prices
and offers the best players. I can listen on my phone or in the
browser and stay in sync. I can open up a kindle and have the book
pick up where the audio left off and vice-versa. This is some
slick stuff and it's my justification for sticking with a company
that represents a lot of things I despise.
There are some kinder looking alternative sources for the books
popping up around the net, but no one comes close to offering all
the things Audible does. That sucks because it reveals things
about me I don't like. I have chosen convenience over principals.
I do it for my phone as well, which is a Pixel on Google Fi. Yuck.
I may not have it in me to be the ultimate champion of
stickin-it-to-the-man but I'd like to think I'm not a total
pushover either. I'll get back at the giants with really
uncomfortable sand in their shoes. Here's a few of the
all-but-meaningless things I do to justify my lifestyle to myself.
1. I have an Amazon credit card. It gives me 5% back on purchases
on Amazon.com and that's pretty much the only place I use it.
Here's the thing, once you get those points Amazon suggests you
redeem them on purchases. If you use your points on a purchase,
you don't EARN points on that purchase. If you did, that 5%
would really be 5.55555...%. Little bits matter, right? Well,
that credit card is offered through Chase. If you go to the
Chase website and redeem the points directly with them, you can
apply those points in the form of a statement credit. Aka, you
get that much money back, but it didn't in any way affect your
future purchases with Amazon. So, just to ensure I get that
extra 0.55555...% percent, when I'm about to make an Amazon
purchase and I have points available, I'll go to Chase and
redeem that many points off my bill as I make a normal purchase
on Amazon. Take THAT giant corporation! I'm squeezing whole
dollars off you!
2. Audible books have stupid DRM on them. I don't care for that so
any books I get from them I immediately strip to mp3s and
back-up, just in case. Now and then I want to listen to
something without Amazon's help. Now I can just play an mp3
from the command-line. In fact, today I finally figured out
a viable method for resuming playback without having to
remember the timestamp.
$ mpv --save-position-on-quit
It will resume where you left off when you quit. If you do it
on a directory it will remember where in the whole playlist you
left off. Really solid solve! It supports time-scale changes
too, so it's got everything you could want for playback. The
only lack is syncing between devices. Not quite viable to
replace Audible, but it's a piece of the puzzle.
I forget where I was going with this phlog. I like audio books and
maybe one day I'll be able to cut out Amazon and Google
completely. Until then...
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