Audio Books

Interesting. I find just the opposite. Background music eventually lulls me to sleep. A good audio novel keeps me awake.
Google for Audible to find a huge range of downloadable books at reasonable prices. They have a book club that gives discounts.
Most local libraries have audio books but big books take up quite a few cds and are time consuming (and, I think, also illegal if we want to be precise about this) to download onto your mp3 player. Or you can just play them on an in car CD player. Thje cds are much better than the older tapes. Both tend to be a bit bulky to carry unless you convert them to mp3.
One of the biggest library collections of audio books I have come across is oin the Alice Springs library. Most of our friends up there loaded up when they did the annual "Relly run" down south at Xmas.

Concentrate on the story teller, lose concentration on the driving.

Way back in around 1964 I was one of a bunch of uni students who were used by the Road Research Board in Denmark St, Kew Vic, as guinea pigs for a whole lot of research on different aspects of driver behavious and road safety. One of the areas looked at was the effects of radio and conversation in cars on driver reaction times. While we didn't have audio books to test with, we were tested for reaction times when listening to music and having conversations etc. The results showed that such things tended to keep drivers awake and that they reacted faster when some sort of response was required. Interestingly, when given some sort of stimulus that requred a reaction, none of the subjects could ever remember what it was that they were listening to during their response (they could remember what they were listening to before, but not during, the response time.) The conclusion was that some sort of wireless background, or conversation, kept drivers sharper over long drives and that when required, they(we) were hit with a burst of adrenalin while dealing with the siuation and this simply blocked the other stimulus out until the situation was dealt with.
No one was tested on audio books, but comedy radio programs as well as music were used and I'd imagine that responses to comedy radio would be pretty similar to audio books.
Other projects we were used on related to drive's ability to read various fonts on road signs; the effects of different colour combinations on road signs; whether or not drivers could judge speed after driving for long spells; intensity of light needed in traffic lights; analyzing data at traffic black spots that was later used as part of the case for compulsory seat belts in Oz.

You have to be that you don't lose concentration though.

Hi Ian - please explain

Sorry Dennis,
I was in a hurry and now looking back , shocking English.
I found that every now and then I had to turn the book off especially,but not mainly, through towns etc. as one tended to be absorbed in the story ie mystery's.
If you take care they are very good.
Ian

Should have said that one of the benefits of the Audible book player compared to MP3 is the ability to add 'book marks' and return easily to wherever you wish in the book very quickly.

In theory, your iPod/iPhone should remember the position of any book (not just Audible downloads), provided:
1. you imported the book into iTunes in AAC format (it doesn't work with mp3 format), and
2. in iTunes you tick the box for "Remember position" under Get Info | Options.

But in practice it is unreliable. In fact I find the bookmark function with Audible book unreliable too (e.g. sometimes it remembers where you were up to the time before last, sometimes it doesn't remember any position).

We usually leave a post-it note in the cover of our iPod and write down the track number/time where we left off.

There's lots of classic novels available as audiobooks here: Librivox

They're read by volunteers and are free.

Graeme

I've tried some of these and similar ones (often produced for the vision-impaired), but frankly don't like them. As explained below, I prefer skilled actors, who can bring the text alive.

The monotonous drone of a text-to-speech reader would drive me nuts.

An audiobook is not just a recitation of a text, it should be an artistic performance in itself. Which is why authors reading their own works are not necessarily a good thing, because they are generally not skilled readers. (There are exceptions of course: examples are Charles Frazier reading his fine novel "Cold Mountain"; Clive James reading his intelligent essays in "Cultural Amnesia".)

I should have said: if you enjoy listening to Stephen Hawking reading his book, "A Brief History of Time", you'll enjoy listening to a text-to-speech reader.

Yep, tg123: wot they just said!

I bought a Kindle 3 for myself for Xmas: great for reading (particularly when your eyes start to age, and in reduced 12volt lighting, when you just crank up the font a bit) but the text-to-speech is worse than Hawking!