How Many Audiobooks Can Fit in the Average iPod?

August 28, 2008

As computer storage technologies improve and drop in price, it becomes easier and easier for consumers to afford MP3 players and smartphones with storage capacities larger than many home computers. Today, you can buy an

iPod Shuffle with 2 gigabytes of storage for under $100
iPod Classic with 160GB of storage space is under $400

Audiophiles can take days and days worth of music with them wherever, whenever…

Question: But how much can a bibliophile take in their portable music player in the form of audiobooks?

Answer: Depending on audio quality, a 1GB MP3 player can store anywhere between 125 to 250 hours of audiobook playback.

This means that the largest iPod currently on the market, the iPod Classic 160, can store between 20,000 and 40,000 hours of audiobook playback! Based on an average of 30,000 hours of storage, you could listen to audiobooks for

1250 days without taking a break, except to recharge the iPod battery.

Breaking it down, that’s about

179 weeks, or
41 months, or
3 and a half years.

Although the length of an individual audiobook varies from book to book, the average audiobook provides between 10-12 hours of listening, meaning you can fit over a dozen audiobooks per gigabyte of storage.

That’s nearly 2000 audiobooks in a single iPod Classic.

Looking forward - What if I run out of Audiobooks?

The number of audiobooks recorded is expected to grow exponentially through the end of the decade, so there will always be something new to fill your iPod with.

Also, there are thousands of public domain works available free of charge for download to your iPod, so be sure to take advantage of the classics that are available to you, as well as new releases to the literary marketplace.