Okay, so I’m hooked now on all things having to do with audiobooks.  This fascination had its recent basis in my decision to try my hand at narration.  But what I have learned in the process has really surprised me and made me wonder why I waited so long to hop on the audiobook bandwagon.

It is really a simple thing to explain.

Until I got my arms around audiobooks, I thought they were a way to experience books if all else failed.

By this I mean that my paradigm for reading in the first fifty-five years of my life was to plop down in a chair at the end of the day when everything else the world had dealt out was handled and thumb my way through the pages of a print book until my eyes closed.

Of course, we all know that the Kindle and other eReaders have changed that model.  Now my default device is not a paper book, but a Kindle or my smart phone.

Did you catch those magic words?

Smart phone.

The number of the people on planet earth with smart phones is staggering and growing exponentially.

There’s an app for everything, and not least of all for audiobooks.

Take for instance the road trip I have coming up this weekend.

My baby girl is starting college in Florida, and I will have about fifteen hours each way of windshield time.  In years past I would have filled  that time either with silence, which is a cool experience, or with random samplings of FM and AM radio stations I found as I drove along the highway.  (Radio preachers are my favorite, by the way.)

No more.  Now I can download a couple of audiobooks on my smart phone and listen to them as I run down the road.  If get tired of a book, I can go to the next one, not by going off cruise and stopping at a physical bookstore, but by perusing a list of books on the Audible app while I fill up the U-Haul.

And there will be a lot of U-Haul fuel stops between East Texas and Orlando.

And by the way, I intend to be a fairly persnickety audiobook buyer.  If I have my druthers, I will select books narrated by the authors themselves.  I don’t yet how small that universe really is, but I suspect it will be growing larger every day as more and more authors decide to join the narrator ranks.

Or maybe not.

Either way, I am looking forward to listening to some authors tell the stories in their own books as I travel I-20, I-10 and various other Is.

Like I said.  I don’t know why I have come so late to this party.

But I’m glad I made it.