What is audio book?

Audio book is actually some kind of brand new technological break through but it’s becoming more and more popular among readers. Audio book is simple as someone, who we usually called narrator, read through all the contents inside the book and recorded it on digital media. It was quite long time a go that audio books was recorded in cassette, but today, the evolution of digital media has gone so far, then we have CDs and DVDs of digital audio books. Audio books were first introduced in order to help blind people can read books without problems. But later, audio books have also become popular among everyone, not strict only to blind people. Many books today, especially, story books usually accompanied with CD audio of its contents.

Moreover, it seems that audio books even become more and more popular among readers for many reasons. But the most important one is definitely about its convenience. You don’t have to worry about if you have not enough time to read your favourite book because you are too busy to read it. You can carry your audio book, with a CD or DVD player and you can listen and complete it any time you like, even in the car when you are driving. Other benefits of audio books is when you are reading a traditional paperback, you are absolutely have no chance to do other activities in the same time, but with an audio book, this barrier has been demolished.

Especially for children who love to read their favourite tales and almost of this kind of books now have audio version for children. This makes children more enjoy their listening, especially when they are sitting with their parent and listen together. However, as we know that the Internet now has ruled our life, all of us spend about one third of our time during the day browsing Internet, and we can buy and download millions of audio books online without waiting for 2-3 weeks shipment if compare to if you buy online a traditional paper back ones.

Some schools have already used some of audio book in classrooms, and no longer use the paperback ones. The reason is using audio book is very easy to maintain and stored. It doesn’t matter how good condition or whether is, audio books will never be damaged due to whether, unlike the paper version as the whether is the key factor to make it damaged.

However, there are some opinion and argument from many people, especially parents about if we too much use audio books, do their children’s reading skill will be gone or not properly developed?. Because if they love to listen audio book and take less reading, they will never love to read in traditional way. Some experts said that there are many ways to practice children’s reading skill and this issue is something that parents don’t have to worry about.

They also give some advice that parent should consider amount of books and audio media for their children. For children’s most favourite books, parent should have audio version for them and let them listen instead of reading. This will make them most enjoy about their favourite books. But for some school books or other kind of books, parent should have a tradition paper version for their kids to read to improve children’s reading skills.

The beauty with audio books is that you have more than one option for listening to them.

For those of us who like to be given lots of options for doing certain things instead of being forced to adapt to just one choice, you definitely have lots of options for listening to your audio book.

If you are someone who likes listening while seated on your favorite couch or seated on your desk, listening to your audio book on your cassette tape player (if the audio book is in audiocassette format, of course) is the option for you.

But if you have a desktop or laptop computer, you might prefer listening to your audio book from here.

Most PCs have Digital Audio Players for playing audio books. If your PC doesn’t have any (very unlikely), you can still download them completely free on the Internet. The 2 best digital audio players that you can download free from the Internet include:

RealOne Player: It can be downloaded from their website:-

http://www.Real.com

Windows Media Player: It can also be downloaded from their website:-

http://www.Microsoft.com

But if you would rather listen to your audio book while doing your household chores, dancing, exercising, jogging, commuting to and from work, etc, then you would need portable audio playback devices that you can carry around and listen to, preferably with earphones.

With the ever expanding market of portable audio playback devices, it goes to show that more and more people are now using them, because of the wonderful benefits they provide.

The most common form of these portable audio playback devices are the normal audio CD players or CD-ROM devices. You can carry these around with you while you do your household chores, exercise, jog or commute to and from work.

The more advanced form of these portable audio playback devices for playing audio books, especially those for listening to downloadable audio books, include:

– Audio-ready PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants). Some of these PDAs include Casio CASSIOPEIA and Compaq iPAQ. Both can be pretty expensive, costing as much as about $500 for the Compaq iPAQ and about $400 for the Casio CASSIOPEIA.

– Compatible Portable Audio Players. Some of these include the Creative’s NOMAD Jukebox 3 and the SONICblue’s Rio 900. These are cheaper than PDAs. For example, you can get the SONICblue’s Rio 900 for about $250 from sites such as Sonicblue.com

Finally, like I said at the start of this article, whatever tool you decide to use in listening to your audio books will depend largely on “how” you prefer listening to your audio books.

For example, for the “young and restless” teenagers they can’t do without the PDAs. I bet you wouldn’t too if you were their age, right? But for the “aged and rusty” who just prefer the ease of being seated on their favorite couch, nothing can be better than listening to their favorite audio books from their “good old” cassette tape player!

Digital Audio Books are getting more popular by the day. Weekly, more digital media players are made available and consumers replace their old cassette and CD players with the modern MP3 players- These MP3 players are much smaller and can be loaded with many MegaBytes of content, music and audio books, even videos.

Audio Books are normally encoded in either MP3 or WMA format. Both formats can be played on PC’s, laptops and on Apple computers and most portable media players (MP3 players), like the iPod, Zune, iRiver, Samsung MP3 etc.

Here are a few tips that will help you making the right decisions, when buying your first audio book:

To download large files from the internet, it’s best to have a high speed broadband connection, it can speed up the download considerably. If you are on an slower – ISDN or analog – connection, downloading is still possible. It will just take a bit longer. I suggest you use a download manager to be able to pick up where you were interrupted, should the line go down.

The file size for audio books can vary considerably, depending on the file quality.

Usually audio books are made available by the publishers in several different compressions, making the files smaller. The most compressed format is usually of good, audible, but not excellent, quality, whilst the medium compression will be perfect for most users. The largest files usually provide better than CD quality and can be quite bulky. If you are not sure which format suits your ear most, download all three qualities for testing, then decide what is most convenient for you. When you then buy your next audio book, you’ll know what firle format to download.

The iPod has made media players popular, and a large number of iPods are used by old and young consumers. The questio I’m asked most often is: “Is it possible to transfer audio books to an iPod?”

My answer is a simple “Yes.” It’s a straightforward process: All you have to do is to burn the audio book files to CD first (this is a step we’d always recommend as it is wise to make a physical backup copy of anything you buy just in case your computer ever fails or is stolen) and then rip that CD straight into iTunes, from where it’s transferred to your iPod when you synchronize it.

Burning your audio book files to an audio CD on your computer is quick and easy, particularly if you are using Windows. If you are in doubt how to exactly proceed check for the help page. Audio book stores offer very detailed, step by step desciptions, often illustrated or even as videos, that will help you burn these files on CD.

“How can I test if my equipment will work with audio books” is an other question that is asked often. There is risk free way to find out:

Most audio book stores offer free audio books. So if you’re in doubt whether your system will be able to handle the files and whether the audio books are compatible with the equipment you own, just download one of the free books, and test it.

When you purchase an audio book, you often receive a user name and a password which allows you to download the files and prove that you are the rightful owner of these files. Like this you don’t run the risk of breaking the law. Such audio books have been licensed for sale and have been approved by the publishers and copyright holders. As a paying customer you are entitled to download and listen to these files as often as you wish and on whatever equipment you wish. You can also copy the audio books on CD as backup for yourself and your family. However, like for any other media, it would be illegal to make copies of the files and distribute them widely.

The length of time it will take for an audio book to download will vary greatly depending on what kind of Internet connection you have. Often the audio books are split into several smaller files or parts, especially if the recordings are several hours of listeing pleasure. If you have a broadband connection it will take just a few minutes per part. This makes it easier to download the book. Even if you are on a slow connection you can start listening to the first part whilst the other files are downloading.