| Our children today are well verse with the latest technologies. A lot of them spend hours everyday fidling with gadgets like hand held game console, computer, mobile phone, music players such as ipod etc.
The question now is, how much time is left for our children to read?
As parent, or school teacher, or simply any one concern with the well being of our children, we needs to grow with time and technologies. Knowing the attitude and receptive nature of our children towards technology, is it possible to leverage on that to help develop the reading skill vital for their future development?
Based on the latest sales statistics, the audiobook sales in 2007 has a growth of 19.8 percent from 2006. Considering the popularity of the iPod, Zune and other portable music players in the market, it is not surprising that more and more young children are starting to embrace the audiobooks, including the digitally downloadable audio books.
Audiobook makes it interesting to pick up reading. Of course the children must still read, but reading any material and still hearing it makes the reading much more interesting.
Below are 8 specific benefits of using audio books for children and students:
1. Using audio books to teach children in school gives them "variety". Instead of just listening to their teacher, they benefit from the change that comes with "another" teacher.
2. There are specific audio books prepared with children in mind that are not only educative but very entertaining. These types of audio books make learning much more fun than normal teaching.
3. For children with reading difficulties, they can slowly follow the readings from audio books until it feels comfortable to read.
Simply following an audio book to read along while looking at the printed material in front of them can increase their learning skills by a very high percentage.
4. Audio books save money. The digitally downloadable audio books are much cheaper than their hard copy version. One way to save on the printed book is to borrow them from your libraries.
5. Audio books that tell interesting stories are very helpful in times when the children have become too tired to read and study.
Most importantly, popular stories that children love, will be very interesting for them to listen to.
6. Children get to enjoy the selected audio book titles immediately. Usually, digitally downloadable audio books can be downloaded in MP3 or WMA format, upon payment. There is no need to wait for delivery, as compare to the audio books in CD format.
7. It is probably easier for children to accept audio books then printed books. It feels much more comfortable for them to "listen" to an audio book than "read" a book.
8. Audio books also have children deal with the pronunciation of certain words that they would have difficulty with when merely reading them. By hearing the pronunciation and seeing it printed, they would better grasp it.
All in all, most children find it a great deal of fun listening to a lesson on audio, rather than having to read it. That is why children spend a lot of time watching movies, rather than reading.
No wonder more schools are embracing the technology of audio books for teaching their children. And with services available freely or at a low cost on the Internet now, it is now more cost effective than ever. | 
