Dear Customers,
We regret to inform you that our Audiobooks app will be temporarily unavailable for download. Late this afternoon we were notified that it can no longer be offered in its current form. It will be re-designed to stream the audio content rather than storing it on your device.
Understandably, we were as dismayed as you are (I’m sure) at this news, but we are working around the clock on an update to get it back in the App Store and hope that it will be back early next week. If you already have the app, it should continue working as before. In the mean time you can still access the content of the app yourself at www.librivox.org.
The good news is that we were already planning to release an update to add some additional functionality (search by genre/narrator, volume control, reviews of books, etc) and make sure that it is compatible with the new OS. The bad news is now we have to redesign it first. So rest assured that those updates are coming, but not as soon as we had hoped.
Regards,
David
#1 by Eric Barnes at June 20th, 2009
Love the program. Would even love it more if you could accelerate playback speed. Hope u can get it back up again soon.
#2 by Adam at June 20th, 2009
Does this mean that ipod touch users will need a continuous wifi connection to use the application?
#3 by David at June 20th, 2009
Yes, unfortunately this means that you will only be able to use Audiobooks when connected to the internet. So either using an iPhone on 3G or WiFi — or the iPod Touch with WiFi.
To use the Librivox content offline, you would have to download the content from Librivox directly and sync it with iTunes.
#4 by Kara Shallenberg at June 21st, 2009
Well, that’s very unfortunate, but I hope you will be able to conform to Apple’s bizarre standards and continue to offer this outstanding app!
#5 by Kara Shallenberg at June 21st, 2009
By the way, I took a screenshot when you were above both Kindle and Stanza in the app store
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kayray/3642555314/
(I’m a librivox volunteer)
#6 by Noel Anderson at June 22nd, 2009
The news is disappointing for those of us who live/travel where there is no AT&T coverage and public wi-fi hotspots are rare or non-existent. It is also disappointing because mp3 music players don’t do the greatest job of managing and playing books.
#7 by icyjumbo at June 23rd, 2009
Are they aware that all LibriVox material is in the public domain? Does that make a difference to them? Or is the issue that the app stores its audio data on the device?
#8 by David at June 23rd, 2009
why does iTunes still have the paid version of your application up if what you posted above is true, something is fishy here! the free version of your application is/was exactly the same as the paid…
Librivox is a free service so why would you charge for an application? You shouldnt try to profit off the hard free work of others!
#9 by David at June 23rd, 2009
@David:
I think that you are referring to ‘Audiobook Player’, a paid ($0.99) app that provides a similar featureset as Audiobooks. This is provided by another company, we have nothing to do with it. I expect that they will have to also switch to streaming in the coming days.
We firmly believe that providing easy access to Librivox should be free. We spoke about this in an earlier post (here).
#10 by David at June 23rd, 2009
@ icyjumbo:
It don’t believe that it was a copyright problem with the content, just that we were storing the books on the device for offline playback.
#11 by icyjumbo at June 23rd, 2009
@David, if that’s so, then that’s really lame of Apple. Maybe there was a reason your app was so popular? You’d have thought that Apple would like to have delighted customers.
#12 by david at June 23rd, 2009
my bad there are two audiobooks programs,
I am sorry for my disparging words.
one application is by Traveling Classics which is no longer available and was free, and another one is by ALAmerica which is still available and is not free! The ALAmerica one does though still offer direct downloading from LibriVox, but its not free!!!!
#13 by Eduardo at June 24th, 2009
It sounds that the main reason is that it was Free, if you think about it this program is really really popular but apple was not getting anything for it. Maybe if it had cost something even say 99 cents it would have been different by making this now streaming it will of course not be as popular and at least from a tech point of view not as reliable as it use to be here in the mountains of CA
#14 by Wube Kumsa at June 24th, 2009
I hope you will be back on line soon. Today, we a group of iPhone users were trying to search audiobooks and instead we were getting the other other name.
#15 by David Marriott at June 24th, 2009
The reason I bought Audiobooks was because it stored the content on my iPod. I want an audiobook program that allows me to listen to audiobooks while I’m driving to work. An audiobook program that requires an unbroken internet connection would be useless to me. Audiobooks was a perfect program, because it automated the process of downloading books from LibriVox. I hope I can continue to use the current program, and that I won’t be asked to update to the one that uses streaming audio.
#16 by Dylan McDougall at June 25th, 2009
I betcha that apple wanted the app to be less capable so that it wouldn’t compete with the paid audiobooks on the 3.0 iTunes store. I hope not, because that’s just plain evil, not to mention pointless because all the librivox books are free & public domain in the first place. Just speculating.
#17 by Carole Heaster at July 5th, 2009
iTunes also features Audible–a well-paid application where contemporary audible books are expensive–not free. Audiobooks was probably competing in popularity with them. Without book-storage-ability on my iPod touch 2, it’s useless. This news makes no sense to me.
#18 by Kevin at July 27th, 2009
An easy workaround the download restriction:
1. Go to LibriVox website and browse to the title you want.
2. Click on ‘Subcribe in iTunes’ link.
3. The whole story will be downloaded in iTunes.
4. Sync your iPod with iTunes and you will have it offline.