The danger is of a practical kind. Slip the tape or compact disk of an audiobook into your car's sound system, and, if you become caught in its spell while driving, you may have an appointment in Samara. Or at least with a body shop. My advice is to let someone else do the driving if you listen to entrancing audiobooks in a car. A trance is not a state that promotes safe arrivals.
Audio prices can be an issue.
But audiobooks cling to their launch prices tenaciously. Available titles include fiction ranging from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, boxed in a six-tape set, to Herman Melville's Moby Dick as read by Burt Reynolds. Nonfiction welcomes both The Delany Sisters' Book of Everyday Wisdom and James Burke's Connections. Supply and demand are working to close the audiobook's price gap, but the gap is still significant. If you have a public-library card and no desire to purchase a recorded book, you can find an impressive number of audio titles at local libraries, where administrators say demand is up since the beginning of the '90s.