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!

If you have iTunes software installed on your computer, upon inserting the CD with your audio files on it, into your computer, all audio files will automatically upload onto your hard drive. However, due to certain restrictions, known as DRM (digital restrictions management), should you download any audio book directly from a site on the Internet, there is a slightly different process involved.

Passwords are required in order to first use digital audio files under DRM, after which they will have to be opened and a short process to ascertain legality completed for you to copy them.

Burn your audio files from the computer’s hard disk onto a blank CD, then, without ejecting it, open iTunes. Transfer the contents of your CD by clicking on “Import CD” which can be found by accessing “Devices”, then “Audio CD” (situated to the left of the monitor).

Although the names of some of your audio files appear when transferred, many do not in which case place the cursor on the file e.g. Track 1, right click, and choose “Get Info”. This will provide you with enough information to rename the track with a more easily recognisable name.

After you have renamed each audio file, start a fresh “Playlist” for them and drag and drop the ones you want into it. This will make it easier to access them when using an iPod.

If your iPod is set to Automatic Synchronisation, upon connecting it to your computer, all audio files, complete with Playlist and titles will routinely be copied onto it. If your iPod is set to Manual, on the other hand, you will have to select those audio files you wish to transfer and then select “Synchronise” in order to transfer them across. This Manual method is advantageous in the sense that you might not wish to transfer all the files together at that time, so can choose the ones you want and only transfer those.

Zipping large audio files is a good way to save space and can be transferred effortlessly to a portable hard drive for storage or as a backup. In this way, they do not slow down your laptop and can be easily accessed by unzipping them and then downloading them to another location. Alternatively, you can hear them straight from your computer’s hard drive.

Similarly, as books take up space in your home on shelves, audio books take up space on your computer hard drive. Therefore it’s advisable to set up a special storage device for them.

Naturally the greatest advantage of audio files over actual books made from paper is that you can take your entire collection with you on a portable disk drive ‘ wherever you go to enjoy whenever you want. And now that you’ve learned how to copy your files to an iPod, you have the freedom to do exactly that!