This year I asked my family for Audible.com gift certificates instead of books from Amazon.com because, quite frankly, I listen to many more books than I read. (Part of me thinks that I ought to feel badly about that, but I really don’t.)

I ended up with $125 in Audible.com gift certificates.

My question was how could I make the best use of them.

What’s Your Plan?

Audible.com has a bunch of different plans. Some are monthly, some are annual.

When I bought my last Treo (two years ago) I got $100 in Audible.com credit towards one of their plans, so I signed up for the AudibleListener® Platinum Annual which is $230/year, but with the coupon it was only $130 for 24 credits.

I ended up with a bunch of credits left over at the end of the year, so I signed up for their $10/year program which let me A) keep my credits and B) buy books at a “Member’s Only” price (jacket not included).

With $125 to spend, my first thought was to spend another $25 and sign up for the AudibleListener® Gold Annual program (12 credits for $150 or $12.46/credit).

Of course I could just use the gift certificates to buy books. With my $10/year membership I end up with a lot of good sales and discounts. However if you use Audible Credits, each book is worth 1 credit, regardless of price. (There may be some books which are more than 1 credit but I don’t think I’ve found any. This isn’t like the old Columbia Record House deal where you’d get 7 CDs for a penny but if you got a long CD it might count at two.)

However, as I looked more closely, there’s a smarter way to go if you don’t need all of your credits at once: AudibleListener® Platinum Monthly. For $23/month you get 2 credits. For $125 I could get 5 months (10 credits) and have $10 left over. For another $13 I could get another month of AudibleListener® Platinum Monthly (total of 6 months) and end up with 12 credits for $138 in 6 months, versus AudibleListener® Gold Annual which is 12 credits for $150.

Which makes the AudibleListener® Platinum Monthly the better deal unless you need your credits fast. I don’t. Right now I have 9 credits in my account already and my AudibleListener account doesn’t expire until 03/23/2008. So I can start my AudibleListener® Platinum Monthly then and I’ll be good at least through the end of September.

One question I don’t know the answer to: if I don’t have an account where I am paying something per year, can I still access my account and re-download books I have purchased? One of the nice features of Audible.com is the “Library” where you can re-download books if needed.

Yes Audible.com books have DRM but it is the “lightest” DRM that you are ever likely to find. You can burn most Audible.com books to CD (which then have no DRM) and there is no limit (as far as I know) to the number of “Authorized Devices” that you can associate with your account. Audible has dozens-and-dozens if not hundreds of compatible devices. I bought a digital voice recorder not too long ago which was actually Audible compatible (you can download them to the device and listen to it via the built-in speaker or plug in headphones). And of course like any sane audio product, it is compatible with iPods and the iPhone.