A site that recommends audiobooks is really asking you for one thing: your trust. This page spells out how we work, where the ratings you see on every book page come from, and what we do about the commercial relationship with the listening platforms. No jargon, no grey areas: our method, exactly as we apply it.
What goes into a book page
Every page in the catalogue brings together three kinds of material. First, the verified facts about the book: running time, narrator, publisher and release date, taken from the official listings of the listening platforms. Second, what listeners say: we surface the reviews published by people who have actually heard the book, because a hundred hours of collective listening tells you more than any single opinion. Third, our own written review, the editorial part of the page: what the book is about, what the narration adds to it or takes away from it, and who it is for.
How we listen
A text can be lifted or wrecked by its audio edition. Our listening grid comes down to four questions: does the voice fit the tone of the book? Does the pacing hold up over several hours? Is the mix clean, without the volume swings that make a book unbearable in the car or on headphones? Does the performance stay faithful to the text, without hamming it up?
In practice, every page goes through a systematic listen of long samples before it is published. The titles we put forward, in the top 20, our picks and the series we recommend, get full listens, and we go back to them when a new edition or a new narrator changes the picture. When a book is read by a synthetic voice, we say so: it is listening information in its own right, and our figures on the subject are public in our Audiobook Observatory.
Where the ratings come from
This matters, and it is often vague elsewhere: the star rating on a book page is not a score we make up. It is the average of the ratings left by listeners on the listening platforms, shown with the number of ratings so you can judge its weight. When a book has too few ratings for the average to mean anything, we simply show nothing. Our own opinion lives in the text of the review, and it can disagree with the average: when it does, we write it down. Our rankings weight each average by its number of ratings, so a title rated 4.9 by twelve people never outranks one rated 4.7 by twelve thousand.
Our independence
This site is funded by affiliate links, mostly to Amazon and Audible: it is written at the bottom of every page and detailed in our legal notice. Here is what that changes, and above all what it does not. The commission is the same whatever book you choose, so we have no interest in overselling one title rather than another. No publisher pays to appear in a ranking, no review is sponsored, and we say freely when a narration disappoints. Recommending a bad book would cost us the only thing that counts here: your trust.
What we do not do
We do not publish reviews written by publishers or authors. We do not rewrite what listeners said, beyond trimming a quote for length. We do not hide a synthetic narration behind a human-sounding name. And we do not state a price or a trial length we have not checked on the platform itself: those details change, and when they do, we update the page rather than leave a stale promise online.
Who writes, and how to correct us
The reviews are written by Alexandra Reed, the founder of the site, a literary critic and a compulsive listener for more than a decade. Despite the care that goes into every page, an error can slip through: an outdated running time, a narrator who changes on a new edition, a wrong series number. If you spot one, write to us: we correct it within 48 business hours, and we are sincerely grateful when you do.