The beauty with audio books is that you have more than one option for listening to them.

For those of us who like to be given lots of options for doing certain things instead of being forced to adapt to just one choice, you definitely have lots of options for listening to your audio book.

If you are someone who likes listening while seated on your favorite couch or seated on your desk, listening to your audio book on your cassette tape player (if the audio book is in audiocassette tape, of course) is the option for you.

But if you have a desktop or laptop computer, you might prefer listening to your audio book from it.

It is most likely that your PC already has some software for playing audio books. If your PC doesn't have any (very unlikely), you can still download them completely free on the Internet. The 2 best digital audio players that you can get completely free to download from the Internet include:

- RealOne Player: It can be downloaded completely free from their website - http://www.Real.com

- Windows Media Player: This is available for download free of charge on their website - http://www.Microsoft.com

But if you would rather listen to your audio book while doing your household chores, dancing, exercising, jogging, commuting to and fro work, etc, then you would need portable audio playback devices that you can carry around and listen to, preferably with an earphone.

The advantages of portable audio players have made their market grow as more and more people are starting to use them.

The most common form of these portable audio playback devices are the normal audio CD players or CD-ROM devices. These can be carried easily when you go around the shops, go for a run or when you are on the way to work for example.

The more advanced form of portable players, used for playing audio books, include;

— Audio-ready PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants). Some of these PDAs include the Casio CASSIOPEIA and Compaq iPAQ. Both can be pretty expensive, costing as much as about $500 for the Compaq iPAQ and about $400 for the Casio CASSIOPEIA.

— Compatible Portable Audio Players. Some of these include the Creative’s NOMAD Jukebox 3 and the SONICblue’s Rio 900. These can be much less expensive than PDAs. For instance, you could purchase the SONIC blue's Rio 900 for around $250 from websites like Sonicblue.com

Finally, like I said in the start of this article, whatever tool you decide to use in listening to your audio books will depend largely on “how” you prefer listening to your audio books.

For example, for the "young and restless" teenagers they can't do without the PDAs. You wouldn't either, if you were their age, right? But for the "aged and rusty" who just prefer the ease of being seated on their favorite couch, nothing can be better than listening to their favorite audio books from their "good old" cassette tape player!

A really good place that I have come across to download audio books is Spoken Network. You can find them at:

www.spokennetwork.com?cam=ama0017

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