Listen to English literature from your iPhone
Bardowl Audiobooks is an audiobook app for iPhone. The app is free to download, but after the first hour of listening, you must pay for a subscription to listen to an unlimited number of books.
Pick your poison
When you open Bardowl Audiobooks, you must register with a username and password. The homepage is the featured section, where you can view featured books in various categories in a list, which you can scroll through. The library is where you’ll find all books available, sorted into categories and subcategories. You can also search for books and save them to your favorites. If you click on a title, you’ll be given a brief synopsis of the book, as well as the name of the narrator, and the duration of the book.
Once you choose a book from Bardowl Audiobooks that you want to listen to, it’ll start playing almost immediately. The book’s audio is separated by chapters, and you can choose to go to specific chapters by clicking the icon in the top right corner of the screen. Of course, you can pause a book at any time, and it will pick up where you left off the next time you open Bardowl Audiobooks.
Some books have multiple copies of the same title read by different narrators, which is a nice option if you’re not particularly fond of a certain voice.
Categories, and more categories
Bardowl Audiobooks is really easy to navigate: you can search for a specific book, or browse the library, which is separated into categories and subcategories. The library takes a bit longer than expected to load, but it’s still relatively quick.
There are lots of specific categories and subcategories to choose from, including Classic Fiction, Literary Fiction and Young Adult (to name a few), although after sorting through some of them, there are many titles that overlap in different categories. This makes it easier to find books in Bardowl Audiobooks, even if you don’t know which category to look through, but it’s also slightly disappointing to see the same books pop up in different places over and over again.
You can scroll through books from a list, although it doesn’t appear to be sorted alphabetically by author or title. You can scroll through the list to see which books are available, with a thumbnail of the cover appearing on the left.
The Bardowl Audiobooks library is a bit less robust than would be expected, and the biggest choice of titles seems to be in the classic/literary fiction section, with a huge bias towards British authors.
For English literature lovers
Bardowl Audiobooks functions well, but the subscription rate seems high for a rather limited collection of books. If you’re looking to ‘hear’ some classic literature or something by popular British authors like Ian Fleming and Nick Hornby, buying the subscription would make it worth your while. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for a complete literary library with some of the heavy hitters, you’d be out of luck with Bardowl Audiobooks. The app, however, is constantly adding titles, and its library will continue to grow.
