If you are planning on traveling any time soon, rest assured you will have some time to kill. Few things can take you away from those never ending lines or long flights, train, and bus rides like a good story. Reading a book is one of the great pastimes for travelers en route to their destination. Walk though the terminal of any airport and you are bound to see dozens of travelers scanning page after page of text from the latest bestseller. I too, used to be a die-hard paper and hardback book reader. That was until I listened to my first audio book. I tried an audiobook on a vacation after much persuasion from my husband who was already a longtime fan. I was tired of craning my neck and reading by cabin light on long flight. I started to take note the he was listening to his book while comfortably reclined with his eyes closed. On bumpy car and bus rides, I had to put my books and magazines away because of motion sickness. All the while, my husband was looking out the window, soaking in the sights and listening to a good story at the same time. So I thought it was time to give my tired eyes a vacation too, and I haven’t turned back since. Audiobooks allow you to pass the time relaxing listening to the latest bestseller, catching up on the classics, or even learning a new language while you are en route to your final destination. Audiobooks have some great advantages over traditional books. For one thing, listening is a passive activity, so there’s no need to don reading glasses and constantly scan the pages. You can simply slip on your headphones, sit back and remove yourself from the traveling fray of the airport or train station. I have found that one the most enjoyable aspects of audiobooks is that they are read by a narrator, who is often times a professional actor. This tends to bring a little more life to the story, as the narrator will often create different voices for the many characters within the story. Also, if you are trying to brush up on a foreign language, it helps to hear the language as it is spoken by a native, as opposed to trying to discern pronunciation from text. Another great advantage is the size and transportability of audiobooks. If you download the material to your iPod or MP3 player, you can literally carry hundreds of books on a device no bigger than a deck of cards. This means that if the story that you are listening to is not quite what you expected, you can move on to a new book, or even review one of your favorites almost instantly.

When Simon Vance was about 10 years old, his father gave him a tape recorder, and he’s been “playing with a microphone and making silly voices” ever since. Began a broadcasting career at BBC Radio Brighton during the summer break of 1976 while studying at Leeds University (and joining in the fun at 'Network 4' - the student TV/Radio society).After graduating took on a full time job at BBC Radio Brighton - moving a couple of years later to London where, for the rest of the decade became a newsreader and presenter for BBC Radio 4 -- the BBC's national speech-based network. Discovered a knack for narrating audiobooks by working for the Talking Book Service of the Royal National Institute for the Blind. Simon won the 2006 Audie Award for Science Fiction for Richard K. Morgan’s MARKET FORCES. “You venture into so many different worlds. From week to week you don’t know which planet you’re going to be on, which country you’re going to be in.” Simon estimates he’s “closing in on 300” audiobooks. He just finished recording THE SECRET RIVER, an Orange Award winner by Kate Grenville.

In 1931 the Congress established the talking-book program, which was intended to help blind adults who couldn't read print. This program was called ``Books for the Adult Blind Project``. The American Foundation for the Blind developed first talking books in 1932. One year later the first reproduction machine began the process of mass publishing. By 1935, after Congress approved free mailings of audio books to blind citizens, the Books for the Adult Blind Project was in full operation. In 1992 the National Library Service (NLS) for Blind and Physically Handicapped network circulated millions of recorded books to more than 700,000 handicapped listeners. All NLS recordings were created by professionals.

Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist. She is best known for the novel Little Women, published in 1868. This novel is loosely based on her childhood experiences with her three sisters. Alcott was a daughter of noted Transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May Alcott. Louisa's father started the Temple School; her uncle, Samuel Joseph May, was a noted abolitionist. Though of New England parentage and residence, she was born in Germantown, which is currently part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She had three sisters: one elder (Anna Pratt Alcott) and two younger (Elizabeth Sewall Alcott and May Alcott). The family moved to Boston in 1834 or 1835, where her father established an experimental school and joined the Transcendental Club with Emerson and Thoreau. During her childhood and early adulthood, she shared her family's poverty and Transcendentalist ideals. In 1840, after several setbacks with the school, her family moved to a cottage on two acres along the Sudbury River in Concord, Massachusetts. The Alcott family moved to the Utopian Fruitlands community for a brief interval in 1843-1844, and then after its collapse to rented rooms, and subsequently a house in Concord purchased with her mother's inheritance and help from Emerson. Alcott's early education had included lessons from the naturalist Henry David Thoreau but had chiefly been in the hands of her father. She also received some instruction from writers and educators such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller, who were all family friends. She later described these early years in a newspaper sketch entitled "Transcendental Wild Oats", afterwards reprinted in the volume Silver Pitchers (1876), which relates the experiences of her family during their experiment in "plain living and high thinking" at Fruitlands. As she grew older, she developed as both an abolitionist and a feminist. In 1847, the family housed a fugitive slave for one week; in 1848 Alcott read and admired the "Declaration of Sentiments" published by the Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights. Due to the family's poverty, she began work at an early age as an occasional teacher, seamstress, governess, domestic helper, and writer — her first book was Flower Fables (1854), tales originally written for Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1860, Alcott began writing for the Atlantic Monthly, and she was nurse in the Union Hospital at Georgetown, D.C., for six weeks in 1862-1863. Her letters home, revised and published in the Commonwealth and collected as Hospital Sketches (1863, republished with additions in 1869), garnered her first critical recognition for her observations and humor. Her novel Moods (1864), was also promising. A lesser-known part of her work are the passionate, fiery novels and stories she wrote, usually under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard. These works, such as A Long Fatal Love Chase and Pauline's Passion and Punishment, were known in the Victorian Era as "potboilers" or "blood-and-thunder tales." Her character Jo in "Little Women" publishes several such stories but ultimately rejects them after being told that they are "dangerous for little minds." Their protagonists are willful and relentless in their pursuit of their own aims, which often include revenge on those who have humiliated or thwarted them. These works achieved immediate commercial success and remain highly readable today.