TLDR – I requested all of my Audible histories. and it was a total let down.
I saw a link on twitter where someone was talking about how Amazon tracks every page turn on kindle. In the comments, someone posted to link where they obtained this information. Clicking around the Link I found they have Audible data as well as Amazon data; yes please GIMME all of the data.
Requesting the Data
I requested my data on 1/29/202 @ 19:14 GMT. from the following link https://www.amazon.com/gp/privacycentral/dsar/preview.html
The Data came back a day later. Sad face panda, login is not working. For some reason, the login kept looping with one-time password pins. After about 8 pins I gave up and filed a support case. I received the “we are sorry you have an issue and will get back to you” response then nothing else. Never heard back from the support case;; forgot about it mostly. Fast forward a week later when I went to write about some chart plotting and noticed this topic in my drafts. – Thought to myself “Oh ya, that data would be rad. Better check up and see if anything is different.” Still no response from Amazon, and the same error.
Some internet things from the states don’t work as desired from Ireland; worth a try. I attempted to log in from a server in the states and was able to login after 2 OTP logins- YEAH DATA!
Reading the data
Well, I feel let down. The data is depressing. My hopes and dreams are crushed. The dream was the ability to see the last_read_to data for all of the books in my library. Really I wanted to see anything showing the time invested listening to each title. All you can see in the Audible interface is if you have downloaded the book or not. Once you download the book and go to play it the player will ask you to go to your last read point // we know the data is there // – Sadly, it is not in the data dump.
The data dump matches the data available in the web interface; downloaded or not. To me this says Audible has a much larger data cache they are not exposing. Amazon exposed nearly everything. Audible no so much. – No data, no API, all you can see is the title, and downloaded or not. Audible we want more data!!
Things from the data you can see:
- The data dump was ten zipped CSV files totaling 97kb compressed.
- Audible Library has 1580 titles
- First book purchased was Go the Fuck to Sleep purchased in June of 2011.
- The most recent purchase from the data dump is Sailing a Serious Ocean: Sailboats, Storms, Stories and Lessons Learned from 30 Years at Sea purchased in January of 2020.
- Total spend on books over 9 years – 4021.40$
- Total spend on monthly membership over 9 years – 1825.10$
The bulk of the data is purchase history showing what you have spent on books, who gave you books, who you gave books too, and your title list with downloaded or not history. The rest did not interest me at all. Well, it was interesting to see but lacking my dreams my interest was dropping – Really wanted to see how far I’ve read. There are a bunch of books I have downloaded and not read / not finished, I meant to go back too. With the limited data Audible provides there is no tool to find those books and work out which books I should go back too.
