From Audio Books To Downloadable Audio Books

An audio book is the recording of a person reading aloud the content of a book. These audio books are also known as talking books or spoken books.

One of the best definitions of audio books was given by William Swanson in the article "I Hear America Reading": "Audio books are one of those happy marriages of art and convenience loved by frenetic Americans. The idea ... is to enable us to enjoy books - a traditionally solitary and concentration-intensive pastime - while doing something else - mowing the lawn, cruising the interstate - often in the company of others."

Audio books have been available for decades, becoming more popular in the 60's as books on tape, and more recently as books on CD.
The boom of the Internet technology and high-speed Internet connections made available another breakthrough in the industry: downloadable audio books.

Downloadable audio books are also known as digital audio books and that's exactly what they are: digital versions of the audio books. They can be listened to on a computer, on a CD player or on a portable Mp3 player.

The best advantage of downloadable audio books, combined with the use of portable Mp3 players is convenience. You can listen to fiction and non-fiction best sellers, how-to books, biographies, children books and so on... while doing boring or repetitive tasks. This way, we can fill the "dead" moments we all have in our lives and increase our knowledge at the same time.

In fact, today you can find almost anything you can think of in a digital format, including radio dramas from the first decades of the 20th century.

Downloadable audio books are becoming more and more popular these days because they are also cheaper than audio books on tape or CD. And the reason is obvious: you don't need a storage medium.

"Using Digital Rights Management (DRM) software these titles are automatically downloaded and a digitally signed when they are purchased and downloaded. These files can be played on any computer that has Microsoft Windows Media Player (version 9+). Once downloaded, the files can also be transferred to selected portable devices (devices that support Windows Media Player) or burned to a CD.

So if you always say that you don't have time to read, now you're out of excuses. Go get yourself a cheap mp3 player and buy some downloadable audio books…..