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NEW YORK (AP) -- Lindleigh Whetstone,18, wears headphones as she shoves clothes into the washing machine. Her classmate, Stepheno Zollos, 17, wears them as he shops for groceries. But they're not listening to the top 40; they're learning Spanish.
The two are students in Kathy O'Connor's class at Tidewater Community College in Southeastern Virginia. O'Connor got an $11,000 grant to lend the students iPods for learning anywhere.
Whetstone says her Spanish listening went from 30 minutes to 5 hours a week..
Students are increasingly using MP3 players to listen to books, textbook study guides and language labs. Books and personal stereos have always been portable, but audio books are easier to carry around in MP3 form. A typical 300-page novel might take up 12 CDs, but only a tiny portion of an MP3 player's memory and prices for audiobook downloads are mostly comparable to audio CDs.
Though a September 2006 Internet survey by market research firm Harrison Group Inc. showed that 85 percent of teen MP3 use was for music listening, with 10 percent for video, and the remaining 5 percent for podcasts and audio texts, the actual numbers for the latter are thought to be growing.
Over half of teens owned a portable MP3 player in mid-2006, according to TEMPO, a study of digital music behavior conducted by market research firm Ipsos that surveyed over 1,000 Americans aged 12 and up.
Audiobooks do cost more than traditional books, however. Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" costs $26, and the more recent Harry Potter books cost $50. And that doesn't even count the cost of an MP3 player.
Marketing experts point out that the audiobook industry is already one of the fastest-growing parts of publishing. And given the new technologies that will merge phones and Internet browsers with MP3 players, the market could grow even more quickly, said Jim Taylor, vice chairman of Harrison Group."McGraw-Hill Cos., one of the three biggest textbook publishers, now offers more than 800 digital products, most with audio, and that figure has increased by 50 percent over the past four years, according to Scott Criswell, McGraw-Hill's higher education product manager for online delivery systems.
Audible Inc., the biggest audio book seller, and Pearson Education, the biggest textbook publisher, teamed up last summer to launch VangoNotes, textbook chapter summaries and reviews in MP3 form. The companies said thousands of students have downloaded the more than 100 titles, which should grow to 200 titles by fall.Students are more mobile today. Their expectations of being able to get digital content is certainly much higher than it has been in the past," said
Teachers, especially at the college level, are increasingly making resources available in MP3 form: Michael Barrett, a cardiologist at Temple University, even put recordings of heart murmurs online so his medical students could download and listen to them, instead of squeezing in time with a patient.
"The iPod becomes a simulated patient, really," Barrett said.
Schools including Stanford University and University of Wisconsin-Madison now belong to iTunes U, a service launched a year ago by Apple Inc. that lets professors post lectures and students download them for free. Meanwhile, some libraries, including Swem Library at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, are lending out MP3 players to students. And for its summer assignment to incoming freshmen last year, Seton Hall University chose to assign listening, not reading: a piece by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins.
In response, new products have been popping up.
"Right now it's a small part of our business, but we believe it's going to be a growing part of our overall strategy," said Sandi Kirshner, chief marketing officer of Pearson's higher education unit.
It's not just college students; grade schoolers are starting to do their reading with earphones, too.
One type of audio player called Playaway -- a two-ounce flashplayer pre-loaded with an audio book made by Findaway World and distributed to the grade school market by Follett Corp. -- was sold to school districts starting about 6 months ago. The players are now on loan at roughly 1,500 libraries, 15 percent of which are school libraries.
Belinda Jacks, who oversees 38 school libraries in the Dallas suburb of Grand Prairie, recently ordered Playaways for her libraries, and said they've become "shockingly" popular.
She added that, contrary to some parents' concerns, listening to books encourages reading. This expands on reading out loud to kids, which studies show boosts literacy, Jacks said.
The key is getting schools to help out with the costs, said O'Connor, the Spanish instructor at Tidewater Community College. Of the 16 students in O'Connor's class this semester, only two had their own MP3 players at the outset.
"It's interestingly changing the way in which people are educated. You just need to ask intelligent questions, and you can get answers anytime, anywhere, in real time," Taylor said. "Education becomes no longer a fact-based learning process, it's search-based, cognitive. It's kind of like what happened to math skills with the calculator."
But just like radio and television before, new gadgets are unlikely to replace the book as we know it. More people are buying books than ever before.
"It's like radio," Taylor said. "Radio is bigger than it ever was. It's just different."