The Rising Popularity of Audio Books

By Tom Reynolds

Today’s society is more productive than ever. All of that increased productivity leaves little time for leisure activities. More and more activities are being done passively, and taking in a good book or magazine is no exception. Audio books are about to explode in the next few years as more and more people become aware of their mainstream popularity.

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last year or so, you know that the Apple iPod has far exceeded even Steve Jobs’ expectations. People like to listen and listening is a passive activity. In other words, you can listen to music or speech while doing other things such as writing a paper, working out, or resting on the sofa with your eyes closed. Quite frequently, people will learn new material such as a foreign language on the commute back and forth to work. While in medical school, I would listen to recordings of my lectures through the car stereo each day on my commute. This saved tons of valuable time, and I feel that my grades improved over simply reading the material. In fact, I am more of an audible learner.

The roots of the audio book come from educational material put into a format that was easier for people to use. They would listen to their book while doing other activities, and learning comprehension actually increased in some cases. Nowadays, you can find popular books, newspapers, or magazines all in audio format.

What sparked the change to popular novels such as the Harry Potter series moving over to audio book format? It’s pretty simple, actually. There is a demand for it. People have seen the ease at which they can purchase and add music to their iPod – why should audio books be any different? In fact, the numbers show that the popularity of audio book downloads are increasing rapidly. As early as 2000, people were beginning to download audio books and today the number of listeners has increased dramatically mostly due to the popularity and availability of affordable digital audio players.

The most popular means of obtaining audio books is through a rental service, or audio book club. Most people prefer to purchase - rather than rent - music due to the replay factor that is associated with tunes. Books, on the other hand, are typically only listened to once and are much better suited for a rental plan. The movie rental industry thrives for the exact same reason.

If you’re a frequent listener or only wish to listen to a book or magazine once per month, you can find affordable audio book club memberships by doing a little digging on the web. If you look around, there is probably an audio book rental plan that accommodates your lifestyle to near perfection. If you would rather purchase your audio books, you can find resources for that as well. There are also many free audio book sources on the web, although most of the content found on these sites will be unpublished literature.

Tom Reynolds is a freelance writer and writes for several sites including AudioNovel. AudioNovel provides the latest best-selling audio book lists as well as a growing collection of audio book reviews and news.