Why your audiobooks might be cheaper this holiday season

If you’re loading up on e-books and audiobooks during the holidays, you might notice big changes — including saving money — compared with last year.

For the first time, many major digital booksellers are now letting you buy e-books, book credits or subscriptions from their iPhone apps. (Digital book purchases from Android apps are a different story. I’ll explain in a minute.)

And for a couple of audiobook apps, you may see savings that were hidden from you in the 2024 holiday season.

These handy changes for readers and independent bookstores are a result of pending lawsuits against Apple and Google that are unrelated to books. For once, messy corporate drama is actually helping you.

Why you can now buy digital books from apps

For years, including last year’s holiday season, if you hunted to buy an e-book in Amazon’s Kindle app on an iPhone, you saw a message like: “This app does not support purchasing of this content.”

In other cases, book lovers could purchase in iPhone apps, but it might have cost more.

If you bought the $14.95 standard monthly subscription to Amazon’s Audible in its iPhone app last year, it cost about $1 more a month than if you had bought the same subscription on Audible’s website. No one told you about this markup.

(Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

What a difference a year makes.

Now you can buy e-books from Kindle’s iPhone app. Also for the first time, iPhone apps of Barnes & Noble’s Nook, audiobook seller Libro.FM and Bookshop, which started an e-book store this year, give you a way to make purchases.

That $1 Audible markup in its iPhone app? It’s gone. And the music streaming service Spotify, which is also a fast-growing audiobook service, is pitching a holiday deal in its U.S. iPhone app for four months free for new subscribers.

A Spotify spokeswoman said Apple would not have allowed details on a promotional discount in Spotify’s U.S. iPhone app last year. Apple didn’t have a comment.

What changed? And what about Android?

A federal court judge ordered Apple this spring to let iPhone apps sell their digital products — including e-books, audiobooks and streaming subscriptions — without Apple taking a fee from your purchases.

Changes in the past few months to digital book buying are one of the most visible ripple effects from that court order. (Apple is appealing.)

Apple’s forced change meant that digital booksellers can for the first time link from their iPhone apps to their mobile websites to let you buy titles. Booksellers, which generate slim profit margins, previously would have owed Apple up to $3 of every $10 you spent on digital books. Those costs discouraged most booksellers from letting you buy in their iPhone apps.

In a statement, Apple said that its purchasing system for digital products like e-books and streaming subscriptions protects people from bait-and-switch tactics by apps and lets people easily manage their digital purchases.

Andy Hunter, the founder and chief executive of Bookshop, said adding a purchase link in the iPhone app made a big difference for readers and for the independent bookstores with which Bookshop splits e-book profits. The link lets you buy e-books with Apple Pay or your credit card.

“People can now buy e-books on the iOS app with just a couple clicks, which has been a boon to independent bookstores who have sold over two hundred thousand e-books through our app this year,” Hunter said by email.

Other booksellers including Amazon, Libro.FM and Barnes & Noble also told me that their customers liked the new purchase options from their apps.

As for buying e-books or audiobooks from Android apps — it’s all over the map.

You can make purchases from the Android apps for Kindle, Audible, Spotify and Libro.FM but they each work differently. Bookshop and Nook don’t let you buy from their Android apps and blame Google’s restrictions.

I can’t give you a coherent explanation why six booksellers have five different ways to buy (or not) from their Android apps. Google didn’t respond to a request for comment.

There’s a pending legal settlement involving Google’s Android app store that should give apps more purchase flexibility similar to what they have with Apple. It’s up in the air for now.

It’s an unfussy breeze to buy physical books through iPhone or Android apps. It’s only when you buy digital products that Apple and Google have insisted on riding along with your purchases. That’s where the drama begins.

So if you buy e-books and audiobooks this holiday season, bless the mess. It was actually worse last year.

The post Why your audiobooks might be cheaper this holiday season appeared first on Washington Post.