An enormous choice of genres and titles are accessible. Whether you are a wine devotee, crazy about science fiction and fantasy or even if your interests lie in health and physical fitness, many can be downloaded straightaway. Various options are open; it’s simple to take a subscription to a plan and rent or alternatively make a purchase.

Reading will invariably have its place, but the most convenient way could be the large number of audio titles now available. A author or celebrity can deepen the experience of many books. Simply reading a title is not the same experience as enjoying audio books told by Dan Abnett, with the all the refinements of an actual performance. Your reading experience can be increased when you listen to an audiobook such as Final Truth by Mariah Stewart and often go much deeper the written word.

Don’t forget audiobooks next time you want to purchase books, audiobooks are a fantastic way of squeezing the studying you need to do into a busy lifestyle.

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Audio books offer many benefits such as the ability to rent or buy educational books and peruse them at your own pace. Interested in studying French? Try an audiobook! You can review the latest business trends, you may even discover religious or spiritual trends.

An extended selection of writing styles and titles exist. It doesn’t matter if you love history, or if you are crazy about biographies even if your interests lie in personal development, you can download many titles immediately. Choices are wide open; you can easily subscribe to a rental program or buy them online. Reading will always be a necessary skill, but the thousands of audio titles available are so handy. Numerous stories, such as audio-books narrated by Jacqueline Wilson, are even better when performed by the author or a noted actor. Reading a book isn’t the same experience as listening to audio titles narrated by Brad Meltzer, including subtleties presented during a performance. Listening to audiobooks recounted by John J Nance can contribute something extra to your reading experience and go much deeper the words on a page. Don’t forget audiobooks when you next think of buying books, audiobooks can be wonderful way of fitting the reading you need to do into your busy lifestyle.

The few real scholars and intellectuals left are on the retreat, back into the ivory towers of a century ago. Increasingly, their place is taken by self-taught “experts”, narcissistic bloggers, wannabe “authors” and “auteurs”, and partisan promoters of (often self-beneficial) “causes”.

Dismal results ensue: the Wikipedia “encyclopedia” is “edited” by anonymous users with unlimited access to its contents and no credentials; fads like environmentalism and alternative “medicine” spread malignantly and seek to silence dissidents, sometimes by violent means; the fare served by the media now consists exclusively of soap operas and reality TV shows; Reading is on terminal decline; with few exceptions, the “new media” are a hodgepodge of sectarian view and fabricated “news”; the few credible sources of reliable information have long been drowned in a cacophony of fakes and phonies.

It is a sad mockery of the idea of progress. The more texts we make available online, the more research is published, the more books are written – the less educated people are, the more they rely on visuals and sounds rather than the written word, the more they seek to escape and be anesthetized rather than be challenged and provoked.

Even the ever-sliming minority who do wish to be enlightened are inundated by a suffocating and unmanageable avalanche of indiscriminate data, comprised of both real and pseudo-science. There is no way to tell the two apart, so a “democracy of knowledge” reins where everyone is equally qualified and everything goes and is equally merited. This relativism is dooming the twenty-first century to become the beginning of a new “Dark Age”, hopefully a mere interregnum between two periods of genuine enlightenment.

Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain – How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

Visit Sam’s Web site at samvak.tripod.com