It’s AudiobooksNow, an audiobook download and stream service that
promises to provide access to over 150,000 tiles right in the car.
AudiobooksNow
already had an iPhone application, so this latest version only
introduces compatibility for CarPlay, which means that users can listen
to their audiobooks when driving and the smartphone is connected to the
head unit inside their vehicles.
Needless to say, you can just
interact with the app from the CarPlay screen just like you do with the
rest of the apps available in the car, but worth knowing is that the
free version only comes with basic capabilities.
For example,
you can access and navigate your entire library if you already have one,
play and pause an audiobook, and use the on-screen or steering wheel
controls to jump 30 seconds forward or backward. But on the other hand,
if you want anything like a sleep timer or a playback speed controller,
you just need to turn to your iPhone for the whole thing, and of course,
you shouldn’t do this while the car is in motion.
According
to statistics provided by the developing company, nearly half of the
AudiobooksNow users are listening to content available in the app from
an Apple device. This shows that the addition of CarPlay support is a
smart choice, despite the fact that the current health crisis forces us
to spend more time at home.
On the iPhone, AudiobooksNow comes
with support for downloading audiobooks for offline listening, but also
with streaming features should you want to use your data connection for
the whole thing and thus save space on the iPhone. You can also
bookmark content and then sync it across multiple devices and change the
playback speed, all from a very clean and straightforward UI.
Of course, if you want access to the full content available in the app, you need to become a paying customer.