Audiobook Awareness Month

Every year in June the world celebrates Audiobook Appreciation Month. Audiobooks are not only an accessible literacy tool suitable for people with poor vision and short attention span but also a great form of entertainment. With their help, we can enjoy poetry, novels and other literary genres while doing chores, driving a car, working, and during many other activities when reading a physical book is inconvenient or even dangerous. The goal of Audiobook Appreciation Month is to increase awareness and engagement with this fantastic format.

History of Audiobooks

Not many people know that audiobooks go way back – they were created even earlier than cassettes, compact discs, and able audio. The first audiobook was actually made by Thomas Edison. When he invented the phonograph, Edison envisioned "phonographic books" to be one of the main applications of the instrument and wanted them to “speak to blind people without effort on their part.”

The initial words spoken into the phonograph were Edison's recital of the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb." In the 1930s audiobooks became available in schools, public libraries and music shops, and were referred to as “talking books.” They were mainly used as a part of educational government programs for visually impaired.

The term “audiobook” was coined in the 1970s when records started to get replaced with cassettes. The development of 60-minute tapes was a game changer that allowed listeners to store more audiobooks without having to worry about a lack of space for the recordings. For comparison, the initial “phonographic books” could only hold 4 minutes worth of audio. The advent of the CD enabled listeners to store even more audiobooks – just a single CD was capable of containing numerous volumes of books.

The popularity of audiobooks was progressively growing ever since. Thanks to rapid technological advancements, these days we don’t have fret over the storage issue and are free to choose from millions of books to listen to. Let’s not take it for granted! the celebration of audiobooks this June – listen to at least one book, educational or entertaining. Follow the easy steps below to any audiobook you want.

How to an Audiobook

YouTube has tons of audiobooks on a variety of topics and by many authors, classic and contemporary alike. With the help of audiobooks from YouTube, listen to them on your computer or transfer them to your mobile devices and enjoy them on the go.