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.

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!