I became a serious fan of audiobooks in late 2004. I was back from my 16+ months in Kuwait Starting that fall, I was living in Heidelberg and working in Landstuhl, a mere 75 miles down the A6 in the direction of (pick one – Kaiserslautern/France/the end of the earth). It was about an hour – give or take on the Autobahn. Looking it up now, it would be more like 90 minutes – apparently a portion of the A6 is under construction. Anyway – where was I? Oh yes. A car with a CD player, a library which had books on CD for check out and an hour drive each way. No problem – I could listen to 2 CDs each day, finishing your average mystery or Sci-Fi book of 8=10 hours in a week.
I actually bought a fair number of books on CD as well. Recorded books had more than the occasional sale, postage was cheap to APO boxes and the library was more than interested in taking books, should I actually be willing to give any up.
Fast forward through CD -> MP3 disks thru phone apps downloads, and lack of CD players in all the current laptops. Meanwhile, I still have an extensive collection of books “on tape” as I still think of them even though few are actually on cassettes. But my fancy, retro looking CD/Record/Tape player can actually play them.
Of course, it is retro. It doesn’t play MP3 disks…. which is a serious problem for about half of what I own.
