About Audio Books

An audio book is a book that has been read aloud by a narrator and recorded and made into tapes, CD’s or a downloadable file.

Audio books packaged as a as a Cassette Tape version, are no longer being supported by many publishers, as the CD has surpassed it as the better format for quality and widespread use.

The CD version of the audio book, in many cases, may be packaged together as several CDs to contain all of the recorded work. A single CD holds only about 70 minutes of audio. Audio books longer than 11,000 words require multiple CDs. Audio books on CD can be found on the shelves of bookstores, and can also be ordered from bookstores on the Internet (such as Amazon.com) where the actual package is sent to the consumer.

The downloadable audio book is simply a file downloaded to the purchaser's computer. Instead of being delivered as a physical package of CDs, it is transferred to the consumer's computer from the online store that sells it to them. For example, Audible.com specializes in selling "downloadable audio books". Downloading an audio book might be as easy as receiving an email, but it sometimes takes a while because the large the file size of audio books. Purchasers usually, have faster types of Internet connections such as DSL or Cable modems, because dial-up (56k modems) are too slow to be practical for downloading audio.