Gathering everyone for quality family entertainment can be as important as sitting down to dinner together. In today’s fast-paced world of hundreds of television channels, millions of Web sites and iPods in every kid’s backpack, sometimes it seems that entertainment is becoming a solitary experience that each family member enjoys alone. One innovative form of family entertainment that is becoming more and more popular with parents is the audiobook — stories the whole family can listen to on CDs, at home and in the car. Particularly popular, these days, are fantasy and magic-oriented tales that can be engaging for both parents and children alike. We all like a good story. It’s no wonder more families are turning to audiobooks, as nothing beats having a great storyteller read one to you. Audiobooks are being used by parents as a great way to get kids to use their imagination, and as innovative tools to get children interested in reading. As many parents can attest, audiobooks make for wonderful diversions on those long family car trips. Some great ideas for enjoying audiobooks with your family: * Schedule regular audiobook nights the way you would a movie night, with snacks. * Treat new audiobook releases the way you would new movies and get the whole family excited for upcoming stories. * Make the car a place for storytelling. Instead of turning on the radio, engage your family’s minds by taking audiobooks on the road.

The popularity of portable music players such as the iPod has made audiobooks more accessible to people for portable listening. This has led to a boom in the creation of free audiobooks from Librivox and similar projects that take works from the public domain and enlist volunteers to read them. Audiobooks also can be created with text to speech software, although the quality of synthesised speech may suffer by comparison to voice talent recordings. Audiobooks in the private domain are also distributed online by for-profit companies such as Media Bay, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), Spoken Word, Naxos, Audioville, Bookstolistento and Audible.com, which in 2006 generated $82.2 million USD in revenue through sales of downloadable audiobooks and other spoken-word content.