Ask Lemmy

I did in the 90's, but only when the library didn't have paper copies.

My grandma liked to listen to John Grisham novels on tape in her car; she drove a lot for work.

My truck only has AM/FM and cassette. I still have some of my Weird Al tapes in there for when I'm driving it a lot.

Not audibooks but as a kid I had tons of radio plays on cassette. Are those only popular in Germany?

The most popular ones were about groups of 3-6 kids doing detective work or going on other adventures. The biggest one was ??? (The Three Questionmarks). I think there are still new episodes coming out today with the protagonists being adults by now. I even went to a live performance once. It was awesome.

But often TV shows got also turned into radio plays. More often than not they would take the audio from the show 1:1 and put it on cassettes. I had Ducktales, TMNT and a weird Playmobil one. For some of these I would actually see the original TV episode much later but would finally realise what the weird sound effects were supposed to represent.

In the 90s, I used to record my favorite movies (from VHS) onto cassettes so I could listen to them at my summer job on the assembly line. What were those movies, you ask.....
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Back To School, UHF, Trading Places

I had a bunch of disney audio books on red cassettes in the early 90's

My dad used to cassette audio books in the car all the time in the 90’s.

I had a few comedy albums. Some of them like Monty Python had a mix of music and skits. I wasn't super into audiobooks. Probably the longest thing I ever listened to was The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in its (original?) BBC Radio rendition.

I listened to a ton of music on my walkman in the 80s, but the one thing I listened to that has stuck with me since then was the binaural recording of The Mist. I listened to it late at night during a very intense monsoon. Just amazing.

When I was really young I'd check out audiobooks from the library, but I preferred reading books over listening to them. My grandparents loved audiobooks though. They had a cottage in Michigan they'd go to every summer, and they'd listen to them during the trip up there and back.

Shel Silverstein's Where The Sidewalk Ends read by the author. Peter and the Wolf with orchestral accompaniment.

My mom had a tape that guided you through isometric exercises to do in the car. There was a large tape book always around my house of like 12 cassettes that somehow taught you how to speed read, but I don't think anyone ever used it.

I listened to my dad’s Clear and Present Danger cassettes in the early 90s, partly on my knockoff Walkman, IIRC.

If it counts, I bought a cast recording of an old production of Hamlet on cassette as well, when I was in college.

The experience is generally fine. The linear nature of books works fairly well with cassettes.

Sure, lots. Mostly audiobooks for road trips or commutes. I even had a genuine Sony Walkman.

I actually won a walkman. Second prize in a rap contest. Well, I wrote the rap. I didn't have to perform the rap. Oh no no you would not want that.

Anyway, I want to say I listened to the Hitchhikers Guide radio plays on mine.

We had a little robot that would tell you stories and you got to pick the adventure by pressing buttons

Borrowed audio books on cassette from the library for long drives. You'd have the book thing open on the passenger seat for easily switching to the next tape. Never could afford to buy them outright.

I used to record my favorite jokes and songs from Animaniacs.

Don't know that I every played them on a Walkman though.

The library had books on tape in those big molded plastic cases. Like 20 tapes per book sometimes. We'd take a couple of those anytime we'd go on an overnight trip out of town.

I remember having the Batman Forever and Batman Knightfall audio books on cassette back when I was a kid.

I listened to them so many times the voice and cadence of the narrator is permanently burned into my subconscious. I still quote them from time to time without really thinking about it.

When I was in elementary school we would go to the scholastic book fair, and they had a lot of kids' books that had audiobooks on cassette bundled with them. My parents got me my own player and I'd sit up in my room playing with blocks or dolls or whatever while listening to The Seven Chinese Brothers or Swimmy, that kind of thing. Some thirty years later my husband let me use his Audible account and I rediscovered the joy of listening to books while doing random stuff around the house.

Just one. I listened to an audiobook version of Fatherland narrated by Werner Klemperer, the actor who played Colonel Klink in the Hogan's Heroes TV show. So weird listening to him do the female characters.

As a teenager, I would record the audio from movies onto cassettes, then listen to them on long bike rides. Damn near wore out MASH and Coming to America.

As a kid I had the Dinotopia audiodrama tapes and my family would get old radio shows like Jack Benny from the CrackerBarrel store on road trips.

Never did it on a walkman, but when I was a kid I was taken on a few multi-day road trips where they'd throw an audiobook on.

We didn't have money for Sony, but I listened to countless hours of audiobooks, standup, and I'm sure other stuff on my (probably Daewoo) portable cassette player.

And for some reason this sparked the memory of having one of these as a kid. It took forever to come up with the search terms to find it.

I listened to „chasperli“ in the mid-late 00s

Yes, I had a few audiobooks on cassettes. In the 90s PG Tips (a brand of tea) had some sort of promotion that gave out free kids audiobook cassettes, I think we had the complete collection.

Language learning courses were popular on cassettes too.

They used to have a rental program for audiobooks at Cracker Barrel.

Search YouTube for "Story Teller Tapes". That's what my grandmother sent me.

I did in the late 90s early 2000s. Now I do it through my phone when cooking or commuting to the office.

Had Krishna's story in cassette my mother had as a present, in Italy, from some Orange people like they had in the '70s. Now I am Buddhist.

We had some of the star wars radio dramas, as well as the hitchhikers guide radio play, on cassettes when I was young.

My parents would play fairy tales for us. On vinyl.