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An audiobook is a recording of the contents of a book read aloud.

In 1933, anthropologist J.P. Harrington, drove the length of North America to record oral histories of Native American tribes on aluminum discs using a car battery-powered turntable. Audiobooks preserve the oral tradition of storytelling that J.P. Harrington pursued many years ago.

Audiobooks are usually distributed on CDs, cassette tapes, or digital formats (e.g., MP3 and Windows Media Audio).

The term "books on tape" is frequently used as a synonym for audiobooks, but casette tapes are no longer the dominant media for audiobooks. In 2005, Cassette-tape sales made up roughly 16% of the audiobook market,[2] with CDs sales accounting for 74% of the market, and downloadable audio books accounting for approximately 9%. In the United States, the most recent sales survey (performed by the Audio Publishers' Association in the summer of 2006 for the year 2005) estimated the industry to be worth 871 million US dollars. Current industry estimates hover at around two billion US dollars per year.

Most new popular titles put out by the major publishers are available in audio book format simultaneously with publication of the hardcover edition. There are approximately 25,000 current titles on cassette, CD, or downloadable format.

Unabridged audiobooks are word for word readings of a book, while abridged audio books have text edited out by the abridger. Audiobooks also come as fully dramatized versions of the printed book, sometimes calling upon a complete cast, music, and sound effects. Each spring, the Audie Awards are given to the top nominees for performance and production in several genre categories.

There are quite a few radio programs serializing books, sometimes read by the author or sometimes by an actor, most of them on the BBC

The popularity of portable music players such as the iPod has made audiobooks more accessible to people for portable listening. This has led to a boom in the creation of free audiobooks from Librivox and similar projects that take works from the public domain and enlist volunteers to read them. Audiobooks also can be created with text to speech software, although the quality of synthesised speech may suffer by comparison to voice talent recordings. Audiobooks in the private domain are also distributed online by for-profit companies such as Media Bay, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), Spoken Word, Naxos, Audioville, Bookstolistento and Audible.com, which in 2006 generated $82.2 million USD in revenue through sales of downloadable audiobooks and other spoken-word content

Say farewell to tapes and CDs
A digital audio download simply means you no longer have to worry about returning audiobook rentals on time, or lugging around bulky tapes and expensive CDs. Because it's digital, you can download your audio and listen to it right away. That means saving time and money. Your wallet and ears can thank us later.

Put on your seatbelt and prepare for highs, lows and plenty of twists and turns. BMW, in conjunction with Random House, brings you BMW Audio Books, a unique series of specially- commissioned short stories showcasing the work of some of the finest contemporary writing talent. Each gripping audio book is yours to download for free. Listen to them on your MP3 player, your laptop or ideally, in the car. So sit back, hit play and enjoy the ride.

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