It takes about eight hours to travel South Dakota by car from border to border. I am so thankful I don’t have to travel in a wagon like the Ingalls family did in the 1800s. I love the prairie, more than any landscape in the world, but the travel time in the large Great Plains states is long enough without a wagon wheel breaking.

We do have modern technology here, too. We easily tune into satellite radio, local radio stations, and yes, we drive cars, not horses to work. But on the long stretches of Interstate highway, between small gas stop towns and ranches with ranging cattle, there aren’t many radio stations.

Bringing an audio book usually means stopping by the library, picking from their selection of CDs and tapes. They have a lot, but I often leave frustrated, wishing I had thought to plan ahead enough to find a book that would keep me entertained the whole trip.

Now, audiobooks are easily available to download to iPods, mp3 players or smartphones, even from the road. Adults and kids have books, right on their touch screens, ready to hear at the push of the “on” button.

Katherine Fleming from Random House Audio, says “Audiobooks can be a resource for parents year-round to encourage reading and to enjoy stories as a family, but are particularly useful to keep kids reading through the summer months while they’re out of school, not to mention they’re perfect for those long summer road trips to the beach or sleepaway camp!”

Audiobooks are a modern day extension of the millennia-old oral storytelling tradition—21^st century stories around the campfire. For kids with dyslexia, learning disabilities, or even just aural learning styles, audiobooks can be a great alternative or supplement to printed books to help with comprehension and vocabulary building.  Teens and tweens who are glued to their iPods can download digital audiobooks to their mp3 player or smartphone so they can squeeze in reading anytime, on the way to soccer practice, ballet class or while Mom and Dad run errands.”