My wife and I started with audiobooks in the mid-90s, when we often travelled five hours each way to our summer cottage. We became very discriminating about readers, and with few exceptions we learned to avoid those that are "read by the author." George Guidall and Michael Pritchard are two of our favorites. I don't know for sure, but having a story read while we were driving even seemed to keep our pets (including a cat in a crate) very calm. In the early days, they were all cassette books, but for the last few years our vehicles have had CD players so we switched to those. Although we've bought a few of these, mostly we check them out from the public library. We've found that the CD versions are somewhat less likely to have technical problems than cassettes although some people are really careless in their handling.