Audible.com
For anyone vacillating between the uninspired but sure-to-please gift certificate and the thoughtful book that may never get read, there is now a happy medium to be found at Audible.com, a Web site that allows you to buy audio books for downloading to a computer, burning onto a CD, or transferring to an iPod or similar device. Audible has liberated the audio book from its dusty truck-stop-rack origins, where it was limited to Grisham novels and self-help books on cassette, and has brought it to our homes in the form of Pulitzer Prize-winning novels, the latest political nonfiction, your favorite NPR show, or even that Wall Street Journal subscription that otherwise piles up on the front porch. Audible.com is the perfect gift for your media-hungry friends who are too busy too actually read but who have plenty of time to listen while they’re at the gym, sitting in traffic, or washing dishes. Basically, you’re giving them a book and the time to “read” it. While the site offers gift certificates and themed Audio Book Bundles, both of which are then e-mailed to your friend on a specified date, the best gift is the Audible.com subscription: For $14.95 a month (available in one-, three-, or 12-month packages), your friend gets any book they want (be it worth $20 or $70) as well as a month’s worth of a newspaper, magazine, or radio program.
This article appears in December 17 • 2004.