The popularity of portable music players such as the iPod has made audiobooks more accessible to people for portable listening. This has led to a boom in the creation of free audiobooks from Librivox and similar projects that take works from the public domain and enlist volunteers to read them. Audiobooks also can be created with text to speech software, although the quality of synthesised speech may suffer by comparison to voice talent recordings. Audiobooks in the private domain are also distributed online by for-profit companies such as Media Bay, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), Spoken Word, Naxos, Audioville, Bookstolistento and Audible.com, which in 2006 generated $82.2 million USD in revenue through sales of downloadable audiobooks and other spoken-word content.

With the development of portable cassette recorders audiotapes had become very popular and by the late 1960s libraries became a source of free audio books on cassettes. Instructional and educational recordings came first followed by self-help tapes, and then by literature and fiction. In 1970 Books on Tape Corporation started rental plans for audio books distribution. The company expanded their services selling their products to libraries. Audio books gained more and more popularity. By the middle of 1980s the audio publishing business grew to several billion dollars a year. The new companies, Recorded Books and Chivers Audio Books, were the first to develop integrated production teams and to work with professional actors. And since libraries made up the largest segment of their market space, Chivers Audio Books established close connections with them from the very beginning of the company's existence.