I recently crossed over the 12-year mark as an Audible user, a whole Chinese Zodiac cycle's worth of audiobooks consumed from the Year of the Tiger [2010] to the Year of the Rabbit [2023]. As an Audible user, I've watched the Badge Collection feature grow and morph over the years with vague notions of my progress till today. The user statistics can be hard to discern from the vague badge collection data, so while I can say with confidence that the Repeat Listener – Diamond Badge means I've read All You Need Is Kill more than 20 times, I couldn't give you an exact number; I listen to that book between books like Murderbot watching Worldhoppers in the background over and over again as if it were a pallet cleanser consumed between larger nuggets of content so only Amazon knows the real number.
For years, my brother played Saving Private Ryan while he slept like it was a white noise generator till he could rattle off any dialog from it like Gordo Stevens acting out every role from The Bob Newhart Show after going crazy on the Moon in For All Mankind; so perhaps this kind of repetitive thing is genetic.
While digging through my Badge Collection on the Audible app, the Mount Everest – Gold Badge stuck out as an oddity, achieved after reading Infinite Jest with it's 56.2 hour runtime, but to achieve a Diamond Badge one needs to complete an Audible audiobook that was at least 78 hours long. Sorting my library by length revealed that I had picked up Galaxy Outlaws: The Complete Black Ocean Mobius Missions, 1-16.5 which clocks in at 85.1 hours long, and this got me thinking: "What is the longest audiobook in the Audible catalog available right now?"
Getting the answer required searching via the Audible Advanced Search page, filtering by 20 hours & above duration, then modifying the subsequent results from ascending to descending by substituting the "sort=runtime-asc-rank" for "sort=runtime-desc-rank" in the URL. Scheduled for a 4/20 release The Jewish War clocks in at 1,429 hours, but this article is about what is available today, leading to The Charles Dickens Collection: 10 Novels novel taking top honors, which clocks in at 264 hours and 28 minutes and translates to 11.02 days to complete it in a one sitting. After straining my neck while looking up and squinting at the "Audible Hopes You've Enjoyed This Program" ending far off in the distance, the decision was made to save the credit, and stick w/ the Galaxy Outlaws audiobook that I picked up from The Plus Catalog to get that Mount Everest badge to shine bright like a diamond.
