Imagine this: Instead of wasting time in traffic to and from work listening to 50% ads, why not “read” books and learn stuff? ( I despise ads with a passion and if you advertise to me , I’ll go out of my way to NOT purchase your product…)
I recently got fed up with my car’s incredibly sub-par infotainment system after 5 years. I bought my car just before they made Android Auto stock on all the models. I had played with Android Auto when I bought it, but it was pretty much useless at that time. It has improved since and Jess was tired of hearing me complain about it, so she installed it again on my phone to see if it had gotten any better. Luckily it had! I connect it up to my car’s bluetooth and things are (somewhat) working.
Of course, everyone knows about Audible.com, However if you are willing to make some sacrifices, there are several free options for audiobooks you can check out.
The most straightforward way to listen to free audiobooks is to get audiobooks from your local library. If you don’t like visiting the library, you can use Overdrive.com which allows you to get audiobooks for free from your library and listen to them on your phone or computer. Now the Overdrive.com site has terrible navigation, so I use the North Carolina portal for Overdrive which is much better.
You can download the Overdrive app, or better yet, their new app named “Libby.” You can search and request audiobooks through the apps or through the overdrive website, then play them on your phone. Android Auto treats these apps as if they were music players and all will work seamlessly.
If the book you want isn’t available on Overdrive and you’re an Amazon Prime member (click here for a free 30-day trial here if you want to check it out), you can try to look at Amazon Prime Reading’s list of about 1,000 free books. They don’t have to be audiobooks either, I’ve got a workaround for any eBook.
Any ebook from that list should work. In fact, any eBook that kindle can load should work as long as the text is selectable (not a PDF with images of text). The trick with this is that we’ll get Amazon’s Alexa to read the kindle books for us. Since you won’t have WiFi in your car, however, an actual Alexa device isn’t the best solution. Instead, we’ll use the Alexa App on your phone and the Reverb for Alexa App. The Alexa app will let you send kindle eBooks to your Alexa device so she can read them to you, and the Reverb app will allow you to host an Alexa on your phone itself.
First open the Reverb app. Then open the Alexa app. You can click on “play” and select eBook of your choice from your kindle library. When you select it, Alexa will ask you to select which device to play it on. Select the “Reverb” option and voila! If you don’t have the ability to select the “Reverb” option, make sure you are running Reverb before the Alexa app.
Your phone will now read the book to you. You can’t increase the speed (sadly) but overall it’s a good compromise. Now this method does use your data, however for about 40 minutes of reading, Reverb used only about 25Mb and Alexa used about 13Mb so total, about 1Mb of data per minute of audiobook. Given you can’t speed up books, that’s a bit of an annoyance, so a 6-hour book will cost you a little over a third of a Gb of data. On a 4GB monthly plan that’s only 9%. If you did nothing but listen to audio books, your 4Gb data plan will get you 67 hours of playtime per month! That’s way more than I’d use it for sure.
Of course, you might want to continue listening when you get either home or to the office. If you have an Amazon Echo, Echo dot, Echo Plus, or any other Amazon device (even a new one I’ve never heard of called “Echo Auto” which could be an interesting option as well). When you get to the office or home, simply use the Alexa app on your phone to select the correct device. Different devices may be greyed out if they aren’t available. For instance, in my car my echo dot isn’t available.
If you have a Kindle Unlimited account, you can get even more free books from there selection of over 1 million.
In all, these solutions save me from hearing garbage-radio shows or political news when I’m driving in my car. If you find any other solutions to this, please drop a line in the comments and let me know!