Portable Players for Audiobook Listening

As demand for downloadable music increases, so does the number of available portable players on the market. To shuffle through the plethora of options, it may be best to analyze your needs and wants.

Are you going to being playing music and audiobooks from your portable player?

Do you want to be physically active while listening to your music or audiobook?

Do you want to be able to store an entire unabridged audiobook on your player or do you want to have the capability to store multiple titles?

Will your player need to work with a tape/CD adapter so you can use it in your car?

Once you have answered these questions, you will be better able to make a decision on the type of player that is right for you. There are really only two types of portable audio players -- ones that play audio content from memory storage and those that read data from a CD. Of the players that store content in memory, only those with large storage capacities have the space required to hold most unabridged audiobooks (assuming 128kb encoding).

Here are some of the most popular models in each category:

Audio stored and played from a singe MP3-CD	Audio stored and played from memory
	Large Capacity (Storage > 1 GB)	Price Range
iRiver IMP-350 SlimX Digitial Audio Player Available from: Amazon.com	Apple iPod/iPod Mini (4-40 GB) Available from: Amazon.com	Creative Nomad MuVo NX 256 MB MP3 Player Available from: Amazon.com
Panasonic SL-CT710 Slim CD / MP3 Player Available from: Amazon.com	Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra (40GB) Available from: Amazon.com	iRiver iFP-190T 256 MB Digitial Audio Player Available from: Amazon.com
Soul® Audiobook Player Available from: Soulmate Audio	Dell Digital Jukebox (15/20 GB) Available from: Dell.com	Rio Cali 256 MB Sport MP3 Player Available from: Amazon.com

Often times, customer's prefer less expensive units that are easier to carry because of their size and weight. The downside to some of these players is that a majority of them only have 128 MB of storage capacity, which is roughly one-third to one-fifth the size of an average unabridged audiobook. You can still upload files to them, but you will have to do this several times in order to listen to the entire book.

The titles offered on this site are not available on tape or CD formats. To learn more about our MP3-CD format and to see a list of available titles, please click here.