But the costs add up for audiobooks, especially if you go through a lot of them quickly.  For one title alone, it can cost around $15-25 in the iTunes store.  This is where Booksfree comes in.  They offer a rental service that is much like what Netflix does with DVDs.  For a monthly service fee, you can continually rent audiobooks from a huge selection without having to worry about late fees.  And you don’t have to pay extra for shipping, each audiobook you receive in the mail comes with a prepaid envelope for you to send it back in.

The amount of your monthly service fee will depend on the membership plan that you sign up for.  Prices are higher if you choose to be able to rent more than one audiobook at a time, or if you prefer the CD membership over the mp3-CD membership.  But you can get a plan for as little as $13.49/month.  If you typically buy at least one audiobook each month, you would be saving money with this membership.

This rental service is both good and bad for authors and publishers.  They get paid for the number of books sold, not by how many times they are rented. But this is not any different than a library offering titles, and it helps them gain exposure for more possible customers in the future.  A rental service is great is you plan to go through a lot of audiobooks, but we hope that they are using extremely durable cases if they are continually being rented and sent back and forth in the mail.  And if you like to keep your wide collection of audiobooks on display and available at all times, you may just want to stick with buying audiobooks and being able to keep them as your own.