It’s really amazing that you can get the exact value listening to an audio book while doing your normal chores as you would reading it.

Some experts have even said that we can absorb information better when we are actually not paying full attention to them.

But what when was the time that this audio book craze began? In other words, what’s the history of audio books?

Audio books seem to be a brand new invention, right?

WRONG!

It is very easy to make the assumption that audio books are a recent invention because of the mention of CDs, downloadable digital formats, MP3s, PDAs and other technological jargons each time audio books are discussed. But audio books started way before now.

In order for us to know just how long audio books have existed, we first need to know what audio books actually are.

Forget about any other jargon you have heard, audio books are simply books that are recorded to be heard, instead of read.

That being the case, such recordings of books in audio formats have been around for a very long time – far before now. If you want to be specific, it is safe to say they have existed for at least half century ago.

It could even be much longer, if you take into account the Library of Congress recordings especially made for the American Foundation for the Blind and distributed free throughout the U.S.

However, according to Robin Whitten, the editor and founder of the only magazine which is dedicated solely to the audio book industry – Audiofile–http://www.AudioFileMagazine.com, Caedmon (now a subsidiary of HarperCollins Publishers) can be credited to have started the recordings of literature as far as 50 years ago.

Going further, he said Caedmon was just a small company way back then in New York, which started recording the audio of great authors and poets of the 1950s. Specifically, he has said that one of the earliest recordings ever made were of the greats such as Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Fitzgerald and Robert Frost.

What happened then was that they were simply recorded while doing their own works and made as vinyl records.

But these early recordings can arguably pass off for the first collection of audio books ever.

However, the transition of these book recordings into audiocassette tapes didn’t happen until the late 1970s up to the 1980s. From then on, it grew until audio books in tape format were accepted by everyone and sundry.

For whatever reason however, the audio book craze did not hit off until the early nineties.

And with the transition from audiocassette technology into CDs, more people have become interested in audio books.

With the explosion of the world wide web and everything that comes with it, audio books have now gone from vinyl records, tapes and CDs into downloadable digital formats. These can be listened to in many different ways, on a desktop PC, laptop, MP3 player etc.

If you still want to ‘go back through time’ the original book recordings that began this audio book industy are available.

Impossible?

Not really.

You can still buy some of the early fifties analog recording made by Caedmon on the world wide web.

For example, recently I was able to browse the Internet thoroughly and found the original recording of “The Lord of the Rings” as read by J.R.R. Tolken.

You can find that classic you have always dreamt of in audio book format if you search hard enough on the Internet.

A really good place for audio book downloads is Spoken Network. You can find them at:

www.spokennetwork.com?cam=ama0016