I listen to audiobooks very frequently these days for 2 reasons - my eyes are too tired to read a page after a day of work at my computer and I also listen while driving, something I've done for 20 years. My standard for the quality of the reader has increased hugely in recent years since Jim Dale reading the Harry Potter series and Philip Pullman reading narration of his own work (dramatized but done so well). I can recall listening to audiotapes that required changing the balance on the speakers in my car in order to hear the whole book as there were 2 recordings on each side of the tape. It used to be tricky work! Now I just download from Audible.com to my Ipod and my biggest complaint is that many of the books I'd love to listen to are not available - or the reader for the USA licensed version is so bad. Often there are versions available to UK Audible.com that sound great but are not available to download to the US.

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.