Did You Know You Can Return Audible Books?

If you have Audible Premium Plus, you can return your books and get your credits back, though this may not be immediately obvious.

Audible has a very neat feature, but it’s not widely advertised. If you’re on a Premium Plus plan, you get one credit a month to use on practically any audiobook in the store, so you can listen to any one book you have your eye on for “free”. That and full access to Audible’s wide selection of free audiobooks are the main draws to the service’s $14.95 a month plan.

But what they don’t tell you outright is that you can get these credits back—by returning your books.

Returning Audible Books is Easy If You Know Where to Look

Ironically, I first stumbled upon the ability to return audiobooks when I was trying to cancel my Premium Plus sub. I felt that the sub wasn’t worth the money, but when trying to find the right section to cancel, I ended up on my Purchase History page after clicking around my Account Details options. Then I noticed that the books I chose to use credits on had an option: “Return this title.”

What was remarkable was that it really was as easy as clicking the option and confirming your decision, and you get your credit back, ready to use on another title of your choice. It’s very similar to how Prime Reading works, where you can pick 10 eBooks at a time, and when you hit that max, you’d return one eBook for another—except Audible doesn’t have that limit with its credits.

Of course, a system like this will have a few catches, but they’re not nearly as bad as you might expect them to be.

Returning Books Has Some Caveats

To start, you can’t return an Audible book for credit if you don’t have a Premium Plus account. This makes sense, as you can’t access your credits or the audiobooks you bought with credits at all without the subscription (which isn’t exactly great, but that’s a topic for another day).

The other limitations are less obvious, however. If you purchase an audiobook with a credit, you do need to return it within 365 days to get the credit back—a decent amount of time unless you have a looming audiobook backlog. The returned credit will also expire after 12 months if you don’t use it again, which is also a decent length of time.

Finally, you can’t return books if you’re on the mobile app; you need to navigate to a web version of Audible to return titles. It’s a bit of an odd restriction but not one that’s particularly difficult to work around.

Being able to return Audible books and reuse the credits are a boon for those who pay for Premium Plus and work through their audiobook backlogs and wish lists quickly. It might even be worth the price of Premium Plus, if you were on the fence about how much it cost before now.

Audible Premium Plus

Audible Premium Plus not only gives you access to the 11,000+ titles in the Plus Catalog but also grants you a credit or two each month to purchase any book Audible sells.