iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

Tucked in, snuggled up, I still remember the hours I spent listening to my mother read aloud “The Hobbit.” I must have been about 8-years-old, an

Apple has released six exclusive audiobooks just for Apple Books users. Five are classic titles newly narrated by celebrities, while the sixth is a collection of Winnie the Pooh stories as told in the style of Disney. All of them are available for free.

Apple Books is Apple’s all-encompassing digital bookstore. You can add your existing eBooks, buy new eBooks, and also buy audiobooks to listen to on the go. Apple gave Apple Books a fresh lick of paint for iOS 12, and the company is now giving freebies away.

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.

Want to read some classic literature? Or rather, would you like to hear some classic literature read to you? Apple has released a free set of audiobooks for classic novels, including Pride and Prejudice, The Time Machine, Frankenstein, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Secret Garden, and Winnie the Pooh.



Each of the audiobooks is narrated by a celebrity, and is available for free as a download from the Apple Books app for iPhone or iPad, or the iTunes app on Mac or Windows. If you choose to download the audiobooks to a mobile device like an iPhone or iPad, then they could make for some great road trip listening as you venture out for the holidays or a weekend adventure.