Recorded Books Reviewer's Comments

Recorded Books is one of the most famous brands names in the books-on-tape genre. Unfortunately, their website doesn’t live up to the company’s usually impeccable reputation. You can purchase titles directly or sign up for the rental program. Although Recorded Books offers about 1000 titles in fiction and non-fiction selections they are only available in cassette tape or CD format. Recorded Books does not offer downloads.

You can search for titles using the search box by keyword, title, author and even narrator. They also offer 26 different genres to browse through. The genre selections aren’t quite as specific as some of the other services we reviewed; however they do include a few unusual selections like short stories, inspirational and parenting books. We did find that when you select to purchase or rent a book it is just placed into your cart without informing you so. It just seems the page kept refreshing over and over. Before we realized it there were half a dozen copies of the same title in the cart. It feels like a small programming glitch that needs to be looked into.

The rental program works much like any other. You can choose from five plans, the cheapest being one book a month for $17.99. The largest plan includes unlimited rentals with up to 12 books checked out at a time. That plan costs $64.99 a month. These prices seem quite high compared to many of the other services we reviewed. Additionally, all plans include a $9.99 one-time initiation fee.

We did find that the customer support was very helpful. Our emails were answered in a matter of hours. However, we are saddened to find that Recorded Books brand just doesn’t transcend the gap from book store to Internet. We feel if they were able to create a comprehensive collection of downloadable books they could really find a new fan base, outside the library.