Hey, what are you listening to?

June is audiobook month, are you a fan?

I love real books. I love holding, buying, borrowing, stacking, even smelling real books. I have hundreds on several bookshelves in my home. This will never change. I have also come to value the the ebook. My daughters and I can go anywhere and if detained have dozens of books to choose from depending on our current mood. What I have really developed a fondness for though is the audiobook.

It started with a difficulty falling to sleep, I had way too many thoughts spinning around in my mind. So I logged on to iTunes and for $41.95 downloaded my first audiobook, A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1 (Unabridged) I justified the price by it being 54 hours and 3 mins long.

Since then I have developed a bit of an addiction. I listen in the shower, in the car, between classes, and at work. However $42 per book is just not in the budget. I have figured out a few other ways that I would like to share.

Audible is a subsidiary of Amazon. They offer a couple of levels of service. I have the basic plan at $15/mo I get a credit which equals any book they have, regardless of the list price. If I don't use that months credit they add up, you don't lose them. Here is the link www.audible.com

Another perk to having audible is that if you also have an Amazon account you can buy a kindle ebook (to be read on many different devices) for maybe $4.99 and then add whispersync for $1.99. Whispersync adds narration and lets you listen to the book through the audible app. When you take a break the app saves your place and when you want to 'read' you pick up your tablet and open the kindle app and it opens to where you finished listening. Then suppose you are going to drive somewhere, you hop in the car and open the audible app again & lo and behold it opens where you finished reading. Magic? Maybe. Here is the link  http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_9?url=searchalias%3Dstripbooks&fieldkeywords=kindle+whispersync&sprefix=kindle+wh%2Cstripbooks%2C313

If you have a Topeka Shawnee County Public Library Card check out this link https://tscpl.org, select the DOWNLOAD IT tab and it will open a huge world of FREE ebooks, audiobooks, music, movies, and magazines. My favorite is Hoopla. Hoopla has music, audiobooks, movies and tv. www.hoopladigital.com(Unabridged)

I have listened to countless books and love all of these versions. I hope you try at least the library options. enjoy.