Does Kobo Plus Abonnement Offer Audiobooks?

I’ve found Kobo’s sync feature between audiobooks and ebooks incredibly seamless. When you purchase a book that supports both formats, Kobo automatically links them in your library. Start reading the ebook, and if you switch to the audiobook, it picks up right where you left off—down to the exact sentence. The progress syncs in real-time, so you never lose your place. This feature works best with Kobo’s own audiobooks and selected titles from Rakuten Kobo’s store. The app remembers your last position regardless of the device, whether you’re using a Kobo eReader, the Kobo app on your phone, or even their desktop version. One minor hiccup is that not all titles support this, so always check the book’s details before buying. For avid multitaskers like me, this is a game-changer—I can listen during my commute and read at home without missing a beat.

To determine the cost-benefit analysis of your reading habit, calculate how many books you typically read each month. Now multiply this by the average price of the ebook you normally purchase (probably somewhere between $5 and $10). Now compare this with your monthly Kobo Plus fee. For Canada, this fee is $9.99 CAD for books that you can read, lending unlimited for up to 21 days. Based on my previous calculations, my average habit would save me a pretty penny, but the real intangible benefit that has opened up reading wideleys for me is to take the deciding factor out of the cost of buying a book. Now I have only to wonder if I’ll like a book rather than agonizing over a fixed amount that I can spend on new books every month. This leads to all sorts of reading beyond my comfort zone.

As an avid audiobook listener, I’ve spent countless hours scouring platforms for free content, especially for gems like 'House of Flame and Shadow.' While it’s rare to find high-demand titles like this legally free, some platforms offer trial periods or limited-time promotions where you might access it. Audible, for instance, often gives new users a free credit to download any audiobook, including bestsellers, during their 30-day trial. If you haven’t used Audible before, this could be a way to get the audiobook without paying upfront. Just remember to cancel before the trial ends if you don’t want to continue the subscription. Another place to check is your local library. Many libraries partner with apps like Libby or Hoopla, which provide free audiobook rentals with a library card. Availability varies by region, but I’ve found surprising titles there before. If 'House of Flame and Shadow' isn’t available immediately, you can often place a hold and get notified when it’s your turn. It’s a slower process, but completely free and legal. Some libraries even have physical audiobook CDs, though that’s becoming less common. For fans on a budget, patience and library resources can be a lifesaver. I’d caution against unofficial sites claiming to offer free downloads. They often violate copyright laws, and the quality is unreliable—sometimes even dangerous with malware risks. Supporting authors and publishers through legal avenues ensures more great content gets made. If you’re desperate to listen now, consider splitting the cost with a friend or checking secondhand marketplaces for discounted audiobook codes. Occasionally, publishers run promotions where they release free chapters or limited-time freebies, so following the author or publisher on social media might pay off.

I never really managed to get to grips with Calibre. The user interface was just too intense for me.

There is a lot of wishful thinking going on with these answers, so I'll just have to be the downer here. Audiobooks are separate products with their own ISBNs and payment structures. If authors get 35% of the Kindle sale price for their e-books, then they get a slice of the Audible royalty pool for their audiobooks, along with the narrator, producer, and audio publisher for the publisher. This would mean that authors are losing money by including the audiobook with their e-book. Amazon offers discounted bundles of e-books and audiobooks as a marketing cost, which they hope will enable authors to double-dip. But from a business logic perspective, it would be an unusual book that could be sold as an “included” audiobook, even as a loss-leader for a mega-bestseller. Don’t hold your breath waiting for this to become the norm.

Spotify does have some audiobooks. The app isn't really designed for listening to them. For starters I recall you can't even add bookmarks, which makes the experience pretty clunky. It’s better to stick to music there.

Yes. The Kobo Plus subscription is only for access to the Kobo Plus catalog, a subset of all titles available on Kobo. The access fee is not for access to the entire Kobo platform. As is inherent to purchasing e-books, you can read your purchased books offline. Just as once you download an email attachment to your computer you can open it up without the internet, the file is delivered to you and is yours to read as you wish. While accessing the Kobo Plus shared drive of content requires permissions each time you access it, your personal attachments (purchased books) are always locally available. I trust Kobo to build and manage a library of my personal e-books, which is why I chose to build my e-book library on Kobo.

From a technical standpoint, the answer is yes. The DRM for Kobo Books (the e-books you buy from Kobo) is applied when you download a book. The decryption key for these books is tied to your Kobo e-reader or to your Kobo account and is stored locally on your e-reader. This means your e-reader will not contact Kobo every time you open a book you own to verify that you actually own that book. This is how most e-book stores work and is the reason that you can read e-books offline. This would potentially be a function of subscription services (should we ever build one), where a user accesses a constantly changing library of titles via “streaming” as opposed to the user downloading complete files for their own permanent libraries or for borrowable titles that the user has paid for or that have been borrowed by the user. In all cases, however, the user will have access to completed files playable on the user’s device(ies) in the usual manner.

The real question may not be how to get Hoopla on your Kobo. Instead, it might be what other Kobo-compatible service will offer a similar experience. For instant borrow model, CloudLibrary via a partner library can be just as good. For comics, you might look at Marvel Unlimited or Comixology to purchase individual issues as DRM-free CBZ files that you can then sideload. This involves finding alternative ways to access the content you want.

Do you remember software used to come in boxes with disks? You could buy it as you would purchase any product off a shelf, and you owned that copy of the software. Years later, most software is downloaded off of the developer’s website and requires you to input a license key to activate it. Today, so much software is even offered on a subscription basis. Books are transitioning to this new model as well, although more slowly. For now, many people can continue to buy individual e-books as they would printed books, but eventually the permanent license model will probably disappear, to be replaced by all-you-can-read subscription services. While right now your perception of restrictive e-book ‘ownership’ may seem annoying, in a decade’s time when just about everything has gone from buying to a monthly pay-to-read subscription model, people will look back on this era of digital books as the good old days of e-book freedom. Enjoy the e-book ‘buying’ era while it lasts.