You can check all this out by going to the Audible.com website. I don’t use it myself because work is 5 minutes away, I can’t listen to anything while I work, and I’m always working. They have lots of books, but yes, they’re the more popular ones. They do have plenty of unabridged books (I would never ever read/listen otherwise.) You can browse their library and see if there’s anything you like. I don’t think you have to sign up for a year or anything, so if there’s 6 books you want, you can just sign up for 3 or 6 months (~$65 or ~$90). You may want to double check that though.
The only time I made use of audio books was when I drove from western TX to CT. I just mooched off of my dad’s account. It made the trip sooo much better. Normally I’d just read (because listening takes 10X as long) but I didn’t think it would be good to read while driving 80mph.
Oh Audiobooks how do I love thee??? Very very much
I have been a voracious reader all my life but only started listening to audiobooks since becoming a stay at home mom. There’s so much housework to do these days and it’s never done (and butler1850 , what’s with putting “housework” in quotes?), that it feels very very lazy to sit down with a book, but with a walkman and an audiobook I can do both. In fact, audiobooks allow me to keep working. Without them, I would just become too bored and sneak off to the SDMB. Like now.
Also, audiobooks are great for when you have to watch your kids outside in the yard or at a park. With my kids glancing down to the printed page every few seconds is a bad idea, but with audiobooks I’m entertained and so are they.
I think certain brains are more suited to audiobooks than others. I am a spoken word person. I have always loved talk radio, mostly NPR, but anything but sports if I can’t get that. Music can’t keep me from getting bored, but words can.
Yay audiobooks! (and they’re free at my well-stocked library)
I love to read. I crave books. I prefer books to people most days. I also have a very active inner voice and I see the story as I read so it can be just like watching a really good move.
But, I have problems with my eyes. I go through spurts where I can’t keep a prescription for more than a few months. I go through phases where it seems like I have a stigmatism in one eye but a few months later it’s gone. I think my eye doctor hates me because I can never find a prescription that looks right. I just give up and take the lesser of two evils. But, it usually takes me at leas 45 minutes to get to that point. The difference between my eyes is just obvious enough to be really annoying if one eye changes slightly.
So, when I go through a bad eye stage, the only way I can “read” is to use audio books. Luckily, this hasn’t happened in about 5 years (except for the stigmatism thing) so I don’t listen to them as much. I think that listening while exercising is an excellent idea and I’m sorry it never occured to me before I screwed up my back. Now, I have to wait until my back is fixed to start exercising again. I guess I can use the time to save up for something to listen on.
My parents “discovered” audiobooks several years ago for listening to in the car while travelling. They love them, and enjoy several of the series of books they’ve gotten into solely from the audiobooks. It’s not something that they have regularly, just when they’re getting ready for a long trip, like down to DC to see my sister.
They even started getting my sister into them, too. She does a lot of driving in and around the DC area going to several different schools each week, and she finds that having the audiobooks makes her less resentful of the time she has to spend driving from one worksite to another.
Doesn’t mean that any of them don’t read other books, just that when doing something that only occupies one part of their mind in a relatively boring repetitive task, it’s fun and convenient to keep the rest of one’s mind occupied.
And most of the readers for the audiobooks they’ve gotten have been excellent, with the reader providing just enough emotion and tone to keep the voice from being a monologue, but not so much that there’s an obvious interpretation being forced on the listener.
My main complaint for audiobooks is that, currently, there is little market for SF and fantasy audiobooks - and what they have available are mostly books I’m very well familiar with. So I go for murder mysteries, instead - fun if not quite as interesting, and I can’t simply peek at the back to see whodunnit.
