Audible was my gateway to the world of audiobooks. It opened up new worlds to me whilst I was on the go. I wouldn't have read so many books last year without Audible's help. However, Audible had to go. Audible, realistically, owns almost all of the audiobook market for individual consumers. If you want to listen to an audiobook, you go to Audible... or do you? I recently switched to Libro.fm - [here's a referral code](https://libro.fm/referral?rf_code=lfm956484) - a audiobook provider who shares the profit with my local book shop! They're also a Social Purpose Corporation, Certified B Corp, and 100% employee owned - A much better setup than the Amazon owned alternative. The good: * The Libo.fm App is well laid out and easy to use * Picking my local book shop to support was straight forward * Email updates on how I'm supporting my local book shop are lovely The bad: * The App doesn't link with any reading tracking services (eg; Storygraph, so I have to manually update it) * I'm not able to see the list of books I've added to my favourites inside the App, which feels like an odd choice (or I'm being dumb, and I've missed it) The ugly: * Obviously 'Audible exclusive' series aren't going to be on Libro.fm (eg; Dungeon Crawler Carl, etc.) but a few times I've searched for an author I like and there's either nothing at all or nothing relevant (eg; searching for 'Stephen King' shows 6 unhelpful results) * Search in general is holding Libro.fm back; I'm often presented with German language e-books, even when my language preferences are set to English. I've resorted to almost exclusively finding books via 'Playlist' recommendations than trying to search for anything Is Libro.fm perfect? No, but it is the first promising step away from Audible and Amazon's predatory business practices I've seen, so I'm going to support and cheer them on from the sidelines! As an aside, I've seen quite a bit of talk recently regarding libraries audiobook licensing models. The licensing model for libraries is [financially hurting libraries](https://www.denverpost.com/2025/05/25/denver-library-ebooks-audiobooks/). More people need access to books, and increasingly the format most requested by readers is audio - It's a tricky subject but clearly something has to change.