Audio Books

Listen to an Audio Book while you are on the go! So What is an Audio Book?

An audio book is a recording of the contents of a book read aloud. It is usually distributed on compact discs (CDs), cassette tapes, or digital formats - such as mp3.

People are busier than ever — and quality time has become a dwindling commodity. Therefore, people are constantly looking for ways to make the most use of their “down time” — such as the time they spend commuting, jogging, gardening, working out, doing chores, running errands, etc. With the rising popularity of mp3 players such as the iPod, people have just started to discover that music is not the only thing they can listen to while going about their day.

An Internet guru recently made the following prediction:

“Downloadable spoken word audio in one form or another will outsell printed books within 10 years. Furthermore, downloadable audio will overtake printed books as the No. 1 top selling product line on the Web.”

In 2004, the off-the-shelf audiobook industry, i.e. cassettes and CDs, estimates reported that audiobooks had become a $2 billion industry. That means it grew by 150% in just 1 year! To give you an idea of the growth of this industry, consider this: The leading audiobook download company, Audible.com, generated sales of $65 million in 2005 exclusively from downloadable audiobooks. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg since that’s only a 3.25% share of the total two billion dollar audiobook pie. But sales won’t stop at $2 billion dollars a year.

Now, you can “listen” to books, teleseminars, lectures and podcasts while you are on-the-go — and when you don’t have time to read. And since today’s selection of downloadable audio books is not limited to just fiction and literary works, but runs the gamut from how-to manuals to business books and self-help information, today’s mobile society has found out that they can download an unlimited amount of information into their brain, learn a skill, enjoy a murder mystery or an epic romance novel — and even increase their cultural literacy instead of listening to drive-time radio.

Audio books and other spoken word recordings have become brain food for the time-strapped multi-taskers of the world!