Audio Books and Language Learning

Why listen to Audiobooks? Human Beings have long had an oral tradition. We used to sit around the campfire listening to stories. Children love having stories read to them. Audiobooks are in that oral tradition. More than that you can listen to audio books when you are doing something else. Many people get terribly car sick (well car sick, bus sick, plane sick...any kind of motion sick), and for them there is no way to read a book while in a car or a bus (or anything moving). An audio book is fantastic on along car/bus/plane/boat journey. The just time flies as you are taken away on an imaginary journey that is just like reading (except you can keep you eyes closed) Audio Books are great when you are doing boring things. When you do the vacuuming, cleaning the house .... Take an audio book while you do the gardening, taking a walk ..

Audiobooks are usually distributed on CDs, cassette tapes, or digital formats (e.g., MP3 and Windows Media Audio). The term "books on tape" is frequently used as a synonym for audiobooks, but cassette tapes are no longer the dominant media for audiobooks. In 2005, Cassette-tape sales made up roughly 16% of the audiobook market, with CDs sales accounting for 74% of the market, and downloadable audio books accounting for approximately 9%. In the United States, the most recent sales survey (performed by the Audio Publishers' Association in the summer of 2006 for the year 2005) estimated the industry to be worth 871 million US dollars. Current industry estimates hover at around two billion US dollars per year. Most new popular titles put out by the major publishers are available in audio book format simultaneously with publication of the hardcover edition. There are approximately 25,000 current titles on cassette, CD, or downloadable format. Unabridged audiobooks are word for word readings of a book, while abridged audio books have text edited out by the abridger. Audiobooks also come as fully dramatized versions of the printed book, sometimes calling upon a complete cast, music, and sound effects. Each spring, the Audie Awards are given to the top nominees for performance and production in several genre categories. There are quite a few radio programs serializing books, sometimes read by the author or sometimes by an actor, most of them on the BBC.