Audio Books Are Great to Take on Flights
On the flight you’ll have some time to yourself. Depending on the flight it will be anywhere from one hour to twenty.
Office papers and laptops just get in the way on flights. And there’s the risk of your laptop being stolen when you go to the bathroom. Conventional reading materials have their own set of problems too.
So why are audio books so good on flights? Well, audio book technology really has come a long way. The latest audio books are small and light and come supplied with earphones and a battery. Room is at a premium on flights. Books, magazines and newspapers are difficult to handle and get in the way.
With these kinds of reading materials, when food arrives you have to interrupt your reading and get your book out of the way for the food and drinks. Also, at a certain point the cabin lights will be turned off to encourage the passengers to sleep. At this time, if you want to carry on reading you have to try to read with a small overhead light which is quite a difficult task.
To those air travellers in the know, the latest compact audiobooks get round all these problems straight away. They fit in your shirt pocket and have light earpieces. Your hands are free and they don’t need a surface to be placed on.
So food and drinks can be brought to you, eaten and cleared away while you continue listening uninterrupted. If the lights are turned off for people to sleep and you want to continue with the story, no problem. As you’re listening to it and not reading, you don’t need any light at all. If you do feel drowsy and want to stop listening, you just have to press a button on the player and it will stop, while bookmarking your place for you.
Yes, the latest audio books have a special bookmarking facility which automatically records where you stopped, even if the battery runs out. We all know the problem with reading materials when we get interrupted or need to take a break. We often lose our place and have difficulty knowing where we were.
If you want to keep listening for as long as possible, you can do so while you get up and walk around the plane to boost your circulation or go to the bathroom. Even if you were clever enough to be able to do these things while reading a book, you’d certainly get some funny looks. Not so with a couple of unobtrusive earpieces in your ears.
Because modern audio books are so compact and light, you can have the equivalent of many conventional books in your hand luggage. So you can laugh along with your favourite stand-up comedian or humorous sit-com, learn another language, or hear the latest blockbuster novel read to you by a professional cast with music and sound effects and great sound quality.
