If you have never done so, discover audiobooks. They are one of my favorite CFS / ME / life-in-general management tools, plus they have all sorts of other bonus benefits.
Along with podcasts, I use audiobooks to take me into another world when I don’t have the energy to read a book, I can’t get to sleep, and/or to distract my thoughts away from the negativity that often reigns when I’m in this state.
Why I Love Audio Books
There are many reasons that I love audio books.
If you have already discovered them and have used them for years, you know that they are a great tool, and really I’m just encouraging you to use audio books as one of the many tools within your illness management regime.
You can use this tool in particular in a many, many ways due to the many different types of books that are available as audio books.
So if you enjoy fiction you can listen to fiction on audio, and before you know it you’re being transported to a different world in your imagination – all with your eyes closed if you want!
I love to use audio books for learning – learning about business, online business and theories and stories around those topics.
I also love to use them for personal development. I’ve always been fascinated with human behavior and how our brains work (hence I went to PhD level in psychology!), and also in how to be the best human being I can possibly be.
So any book that really looks at any aspect of human behaviour and also how to change or enhance certain behaviours really calls to me. Having them read to me in audio format is so much easier than reading the actual book too!
I also enjoy books on, for want of a better word, spirituality – books that explore different ways of thinking and explore the wisdom of the ages.
I’ll give you some examples of the books I love and recommend in tomorrow’s blog, and you can get an idea of which audio books I enjoy listening to.
They may not be what you like but the beauty of audio books is that you get to choose the topic of what interests you the most.
Why Audio Books Are Such A Great Tool In CFS / ME Management
- I’ve already mentioned some reasons why I love audio books and I might repeat myself here, but some of it’s worth repeating.
My favorite place to listen to audio books is in bed which I’ve blogged about numerous times.
I listen to them on the days or hours when I’m too exhausted to get out of bed, or when I know my body needs to rest but often my mind has other ideas.
Sometimes in order to force myself to rest I will put an audio book or podcast on and lay in bed. It means I’m still kinda doing something and I feel like I’m getting some value out of my day, but my body is getting rest.
It’s maybe not ideal as it’s not allowing my mind to rest, but often it’s my body that needs the most rest. And if I didn’t find a way to focus my restless mind, I’d end up getting out of bed when I really shouldn’t (yes, I’m a classic Type A personality in many ways!).
- I can listen while I’m doing other things, such as doing the dishes, other housework or laying in the bath. I used to read paper books in the bath occasionally (which would sometimes lead to them getting very soggy if I accidentally dropped them!).
So listening to audio books in the bath is good (but I also keep my phone or my mp3 player well away from the water because they don’t like water either!).;-)
I can also listen when I’m driving, which is something that I love to do because sometimes (when I’m well enough) I drive long distances to Melbourne or to my hometown – which takes an hour or two.
I can listen doing housework and even gardening if ever I get out there!
5 Ways To Get Audio Books Online
There are number of ways to access audio books online and here are the ones I know about.
1. Audible
My current favorite way is by Audible. Yes, I do have to pay for that, but for me it’s worth it.
I pay $14.95 a month to receive one credit. One credit gives you a book, and that book can be worth varying amounts. Sometimes the book may cost $30 if you bought it outside of the membership, sometimes it may cost you less than that or sometimes it would have cost up to $80-100.
Some of these books are 70 or more hours long. One of my favorite authors is Diana Gabaldon, and some of her books are that long, so you could get good quality out of your one credit.
I actually sometimes choose to buy the ones that are only $6 to $7 separately from my membership, and use my credits for the ones that are longer and that usually would cost me more.
When I signed up for Audible, I got the usual one month free trial, and I also managed to get a deal of $7.95 a month for the first three months, so sometimes those deals are available.
I love Audible because I have the app on my smartphone. Once it’s downloaded I can press play on my smartphone and it doesn’t matter if we have internet coverage or not, I have a book to listen to (or many, as the whole library I’ve purchased over time stays on there all the time!).
I can listen to any number of books that I’ve downloaded over time and I can re-listen to them as well, which allows me to go over certain chapters or sections again very easily – or the whole book if I love it enough (which happens often!).
Because of my electrosensitivity my smartphone does give me terrible headaches whenever I text or when I use it while looking at the screen in any way (or as an actual phone!! :-). But the beauty of it is that once I start the audio book going and I lock the screen, it goes black and for some reason it doesn’t affect me anymore (or certainly it’s a very minimal effect and I don’t know it).
So I can listen to audio books via Audible on my smartphone and take it anywhere and I have heaps and heaps of books there ready for me to listen to at anytime.
It also keeps your place where you’re up to, so I could stop listening to a book a month ago and then just decide I want to keep listening to it today and it would be in exactly the same spot as when I last listened to it.
You can also put bookmarks in and refer back to them later.
Can you tell I’m a little bit in love with Audible?! And I’m not even an affiliate. (I want to be, but Commission Junction has not accepted my application for some reason. If that changes, I’d always let you know if I was including an affiliate link.)
As long as you have the US membership, you can also use Audible Manager to transfer your books on CD (it takes quite a few to do so, but you can do it!). With the new Australian membership that option didn’t exist, so I didn’t transfer.
2. Other Online Membership Sites
There are naturally other audio book membership sites where you can be a member or purchase them individually, although I haven’t used any others.
I did try audiobooks.com but it only seems to be U.S. based. I attempted to join up because they sponsor my favorite podcast Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income podcast.
So I thought I’d try the first month for free because there was a free book available and I also got access to Pat’s e-book – Let Go – on audio, which is the only way to do so.
Unfortunately it didn’t have an option to use in Australia, so if you’re U.S based audiobooks.com is definitely another option to Audible.
I haven’t used that enough to really comment too much on it but because Pat Flynn recommends it, I do think it must be a high quality product because he only recommends things he has tried himself, and he wouldn’t be recommending it if it wasn’t good quality.
It’s around the same price – US$14.95 – as far as I know but, like Audible, audiobooks.com both give one month of trial membership, which gives you one book credit.
So, if nothing else, you could sign up for the trial of one book and then cancel it at the end of that so you get one whole book. Not exactly what they want you to do, but it is an option!
3. Free via Your Library
There’s also many free options for getting audio books, and one of the ones that I got very excited about in recent years was the fact that my membership to my local library allowed me free access to many online audio books.
So just by having a free membership to my local library, I can log in with my card number and then I have access to a number of audiobook websites where I can just download audio books and “borrow” them.
They’ve got a certain number that they can allow to be downloaded at any one time, and the idea is that you download them, you listen to them and you get an email in a couple of weeks to say that your audiobook is “due back”..
Then you can “give it back” (aka delete it from your computer) or you can renew it.
As the “borrower” of that book, they basically just rely on an honesty system. It does say in the fine print that you can keep it until you have finished reading it, so sometimes it really does take me a long time to get through an audio book when I have lots of others on the go at once.
So you’re meant to delete it when you finish reading the book, and, if nothing else, if you don’t delete it, just make sure you don’t do anything dodgy with it, like sell it.
The authors of these books have taken a lot of time to write them, and they deserve that to be respected and honoured.
It’s a gift to us really that we get it for free from our local library, so if you do keep it and wanna listen to it again just make sure that you don’t do anything dishonest with them I guess.
There’s a bit of a grey area with audio books I think. Because if I own a hard copy book, I will often lend it to a friend. I believe I should have the right to also do that with an audio book. But does making 10 copies of a book, then loaning them to 10 friends, go past the point of legitimacy?! I kinda think it does, but I’m really not clear. If I’m not selling it, is that okay? I’m sure there’s blogs about that topic.
I mean I don’t think any of my readers would do anything dishonest but it’s just something to bare in mind.
So, after that little ethical rant, in summary, make sure you check out if you can get free audio books at your local library.
4. Free Audiobooks Online
You can do a search in Google for “Free audio books” and there’s lots of options that come up.
I just tried Googling it and came up with lots of sites.
There is http://www.allyoucanbooks.com where you can download unlimited audio books and ebooks in the first 30 days trial, but THEN if you don’t cancel, a $US19.99 membership kicks in. But unlimited downloads in that first 30 days could set you up with books for quite some time!
On http://www.booksshouldbefree.com and https://librivox.org they offer thousands of free public domain audio books and ebooks. They appear to be a lot of the classics, but I didn’t explore the whole lot. You can let me know if you do!
I also found these 2 really helpful posts – 16 Best Websites For Free Audiobooks – and Websites To Download Free Audio Books – Best Of.
Just a note of caution re downloading from free sites – be careful because they will often have ads in them, and, often as part of the download process they will download a particular program or game or something really annoying onto your computer unless you unclick a box in the download process.
And sometimes you don’t get the option to untick a box, and you get an extra annoying program OR you get a virus or other nasty thing.
So just beware with those, but if you know what you’re doing there are plenty of options.
The safer ones are the more official ones mentioned in the 3rd paragraph above.
5. Sites Like BitTorrent.com
Sometimes big name authors have even given their books away for free on sites such as Bittorrent.com.
It means you have to download their software/app, and a few other things go with the process, but ultimately, you end up with really recent, top quality audio book for free.
I downloaded one recently by Tim Ferris, who’s a very famous writer in the business/internet business field. His book The Four Hour Work Week was a massive hit, and his follow-up books – The Four Hour Body and The Four Hour Chef – were also.
And he chose to give The 4-Hour Chef away for free on Bittorrent.com.
I’m sure there are other similar sites, but I don’t know of them at this time. Go searching if you’re interested!
(6. Late Mail – Oops! I forgot iTunes)
The title to this late addition says it all. I just remembered iTunes sells audiobooks. Having never purchased one from iTunes, I totally forgot that. Sorry to all the Apple fanatics out there. I love iTunes, but obviously due to all the options outlined above, it’s not something I’ve ever needed to used for audiobooks.
Let me know if you have, and what your experiences with it have been like.
Today’s Action Step
Find one free audiobook online and download it to your computer, tablet, phone or mp3 player. OR sign up for a trial of Audible, Audiobooks.com or AllYouCanBooks.com and download a book (or lots if it’s the latter option). Let me know in the comments section how it goes.
Phew! That took longer than I thought. Story of my life :-).
Tomorrow I will give you 10 of my favourite audiobooks (so far), and tell you why they had such an impact on me, and why I think they would also benefit you!
Stay Tuned.
Fino a domani (Until Tomorrow in Italian)
Keep Smiling 🙂
Louise
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