I listen to audiobooks whenever I don’t need to devote my listening/comprehension attention to anything else. It’s a great way for me to catch up on books, since between biking to work and back, driving everywhere and running at the gym, I have something like 12 hours that I can devote to listening to audiobooks.

I encourage you to figure out how much time in a week you’re doing something mechanical like running, driving, biking, etc. If it’s a significant amount of time, like 5 hours or more, you should strongly consider listening to audiobooks.

There are good sites that offer audiobook rentals in a way similar to how Netflix does movies and TV shows, for example http://www.simplyaudiobooks.com or http://www.booksfree.com. If you want to catch up on the classics, I strongly recommend you to check out http://librivox.org which contains a very good collection of books from the public domain read out by volunteers. I’ve been using it for about two years now and, modulo differences in sound volume on the mp3 files (which I can correct with http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net), have been very satisfied with the quality.

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