---------------------------------------- Audio Books March 23rd, 2018 ---------------------------------------- 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...