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As is required of all women in their 30s, I am in a book club. At the first meeting of this group, one poor unsuspecting woman mentioned that she had listened to that month's selection instead of reading it. That, the rest of the group decided together, is definitely cheating. Never mind that no one could exactly articulate how or why it was cheating; it just felt like it was, and others would agree. She never substituted the audiobook for the print version again (or, if she did, she never again admitted it). This question - whether or not listening to an audiobook is "cheating" - is one University of Virginia psychologist Daniel Willingham gets fairly often, especially ever since he published a book, in 2015, on the science of reading. (That one was about teaching children to read; he's got another book out next spring about adults and reading.) He is very tired of this question, and so, recently, he wrote a blog post addressing it. (His opening line: "I've been asked this question a lot and I hate it.") If, he argues, you take the question from the perspective of cognitive psychology - that is, the mental processes involved - there is no real difference between listening to a book and reading it. So, according to that understanding of the question: No, audiobooks are not cheating.

"I know there have got to be some people out there who are having trouble getting audiobooks they've downloaded on their computer onto their iPad (or iPhone). It is a fairly simple process, but Apple doesn't make it completely clear. Even after you think you've properly downloaded one onto your device, you may have trouble finding it. Check out our tutorial on how to get your audiobooks onto your iPad and then where to find them once they are there."

Digital audiobooks can be purchased online including Audible, eMusic, and iTunes. iTunes keeps audiobooks separate from your music library so as to make them easier to find. Also, it allows you to adjust the playback speed of the file as well as resume from the previously played chapter where it left. Just by tuning few settings, you can ready your iTunes and iPod to recognize any audio file or group of audio files as an audiobook.

"Today as we were sifting through Open Culture's list of over 700 free audio books we came across this great resource from Internet Archive. This is a collection embedding hundreds of free audio books covering a wide variety of themes and topics meticulously curated by the folks in LibriVox. the collection is huge and you may want to use the integrated search functionality to search for specific titles. You can narrow down your search using criteria such as views, title, date reviewed/published/ archived, and creator. Once you find your audiobook, click on its cover page and you will be directed to a page where you can listen, download and access more details about it including publication date, usage licenses, and reviews."

Download two free audiobooks a day.

"GoodReader, the popular document reader app developed by Good.iWare, has just received another significant update. Within the past couple of months, GoodReader received a couple of updates that brought iOS 8 compatibility, iPhone 6 optimizations, iCloud Drive integration, Touch ID support, and more. Now, the latest update to GoodReader introduces more improvements, most notably a new Speak feature that effectively turns any PDF or TXT document into an audiobook."

"Free Books is a great free iPad app that provides you with a huge library of eBooks and audiobooks. It actually contains over 23.000 classic books that are all in public domain. These books span a wide variety of topics and different fields in human history including letters of leaders, the collected works of geniuses, the finest Victorian novels, the plays of Shakespeare, the philosophy of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Carnegie. It's all here, along with tens of thousands of other books."

"Children and teens with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are visual learners. Thus, there appears to be great potential in the use of iPhones and iPads, which are very visually-oriented devices, to help these kids achieve their educational goals."

Loads of audiobooks for students of all ages. 

With the No. 1 bestseller The World Is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman helped millions of readers see and understand globalization in a new way. Now you can have it for free. From now until August 11th, you can download the audiobook version of The World Is Flat and receive an exclusive audio preview excerpt of Hot, Flat, and Crowded.

Including MP# and Ipod versions of The King James Bible,Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan Treasure Island by R. L. Stevenson, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Classic Short Stories Vol 1 by Various, Ten Days in a Madhouse by Nellie Bly, White Fang by Jack London, The Four Million by O. Henry,American Indian Folklore and Fairy Tales, The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

Streaming audiobooks read by members of the Screen Actors Guild.

"According to a study led by Lee Rainie of the Pew Research Center, about 23% of 1005 participants (randomly called via landline and cell phone) had not read a book in the past year, including ebooks, printed books, or audiobooks. With the massive influx of information that students receive on a daily basis thanks to the Internet, it is not a surprising statistic. Not surprising, but quite alarming."