Help, I'm running out of library!

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I love books.
I walk about an hour every day.
I hate not having anything to think about.

Logical response: Listening to audiobooks checked out from my library's online collection. I download them to my mp3 player and listen to them anytime I'm not doing something that's interesting enough to keep my attention, from playing a computer game to scrubbing the dishes.

The problem: I'm scraping bottom. I exhausted the Science and History sections ages ago, and the sci-fi/fantasy collection and classics collections more recently. It's getting harder and harder to find audiobooks I'm interested in. They have a few thousand books total; but I'm not interested in self-help books or romance novels or "How to Speak Japanese".

Thankfully, when it comes to regular printed books, I won't run out of interesting ones to read for a long while. The libraries in my entire county are linked, and interlibrary loan means I can access everything from the two-room small-town ones to the big-city public library. I've exhausted local libraries twice already, but thankfully these are connected and that won't happen.

But... audiobooks. I'm running out of audiobooks and my brain needs input! The library doesn't get in new titles nearly fast enough.

I go through three or four audiobooks a week, some weeks. At least one, routinely.

Does anybody here know of a good online library for audiobooks? I don't want to buy them; I want to rent them short-term. Audiobooks often cost $10-$25 to download if you want to keep them but I know there are probably subscription services that should be cheaper.

I need:
--mp3 format, or something similar that can be played on a digital media player
--Inexpensive, less than $20/month
--Ability to check out about ten books per month at least; preferably, a flat fee for unlimited audiobooks.
--A large selection of nonfiction including fairly advanced topics, especially science. Probably only possible for services with a very large selection, period. I'm looking for something around fifty to a hundred thousand books, total, which will probably include two or three hundred I'd be interested in.

Anybody know of anything like that? I've been googling and it's just plain confusing trying to sort through all the services and wondering which one's going to cheat me out of my credit card data.

I'm not familiar with any specific libraries with eBooks, but I found some classic stories in audiobook form on iTunes and eBooks are another good option.

If you can get ahold of pdf versions of books, you may be able to run a speech to text program on them. I know there is an Android app for PDF to speech, which may work for you.

I subscribe to Audible. Awesome quality and a pretty big range, although the subscription only provides one free audiobook per month.

They have a $100 off special offer for certain Amazon products (http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?i ... cId=598985) if you sign up for 12 months at $14.95 per month (i.e. $6.62 per month after the free $100). Pretty good value IMHO.

Audible books are not mp3s though, they're audible books, which have DRM on them and need to be played by audible capable devices (of which there are many but the point still stands)

Callista, have you checked other libraries such as Philidelphia's library to see if they have more available? I know its possible to buy a yearly membership for out of state residents (that one is $35/year, others have other prices) for some library to allow for access to overdrive (which is the ebook library loaning such, that also has audiobooks, don't know what format the audiobooks are though) some might at least be able to hold you over long enough to be worth the money if it has the correct type of audiobooks.

Ah that's true. I used the $100 to purchase a iPod nano so problem solved =)

I subscribe to a ton of podcasts.

Download audiobooks online.

Problem solved.

Problem: You're running out of unread books at your local podunk library.
Solution: Find a good university library. You should never run out.

Find a podcast series on something that interests you?

I have discovered iTunes U which are university courses that you can download on your iPod. I love listening to college lectures and don't have to do homework! Yale University has a great selection of topics.

FYI, I love your blog! I've been following it for about a year. Keep up the great work!

Try academic earth, it's free and it should keep you busy for a while.

My bookshop has way more books in it than my local library as I live in a tiny town and the nearest large one is in Blackburn or Manchester 20 miles away, so I know where you are coming from, but I am not sure how a book subscription service could work?

How could anyone make an ebook self-destruct after a month, instead of letting you simply keep it?

Will the subscription service send people around personally to delete everything you have hired? lol

Download all the TED talks and turn them into audio only. Good stuff!! !

This probably only meets some of your criteria, but there are lots of free audiobooks available through librivox at librivox.org. They make free public domain audiobooks by volunteer effort; reader quality varies widely (there are some great readers, and some not very good ones), and the fact that the books have to be public domain limits the range of content.

Here's how it fits your criteria:
"--mp3 format, or something similar that can be played on a digital media player"
Yes.

"--Inexpensive, less than $20/month"
Yes. Free.

"--Ability to check out about ten books per month at least; preferably, a flat fee for unlimited audiobooks."
Yes. Unlimited.

"--A large selection of nonfiction including fairly advanced topics, especially science. Probably only possible for services with a very large selection, period. I'm looking for something around fifty to a hundred thousand books, total, which will probably include two or three hundred I'd be interested in."

There is some nonfiction, but due to the public domain constraint, it's mostly old, so not good for things where being out-of-date matters, which is most of science. (You can, however, listen to things like original works by Charles Darwin (and probably more old scientific works but it would take some effort to find them.))

Another vote for podcasts. I listen to several you can get for free from National Public Radio.