Audio Books

Formerly know as books on tape, audio books are in my opinion vastly under appreciated. My first use of audio books was back in college. My brother and I drove out to Colorado for spring break, and we listened to Mario Puzo's the Sicilian. I discovered that listening to a book really helps the drive go faster. After college, I had a job selling windows and siding. This involved up to 5 hours driving a day, sometimes even more. I lived across the road from the library, and I made good use of it. I listed to most of Tom Clancy's books. I discovered Roger Zelazny's world of Amber. It made the drive home at 10 pm after having 2 no shows and a no sale in the evening much more bearable.

Now one of the downsides of audio books was the sheer amount of media required. A good sized book can have over 20 hours of audio easily. A Storm of Swords is pushing 50 hours. On a 90 minute tape that's one hell of a lot of tapes. On a 75 minute CD that's 40 of them. Needless to say that become unwieldly. It also leads to abridgments, which in most cases I view as an abomination. But in the last several years with the rise of the I-pod and other hard drive based mp3 players full 1200 page translations of books became much more feasible. Audible dot com is a good seller of digital audio books, the main drawback being is they are in a proprietary format and therefore wont work with all players. Its a massive undertaking to convert them to the more accessible mp3 format.

Anyway, despite the drawbacks, I'm a huge fan. If I'm driving anywhere more than 30 minutes or so I put a book on. I listen when I walk the dog, or go jogging. While audio books will never replace the love I have for sitting down with a hard bound book, They definitely have their place.