Audiofile magazine hosts a clambake in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, every July for people who make a living, more or less, in audiobooks. "Exploding" is a word I heard three times during the party this year—as in "the business is exploding." Of course we're all interested parties, and as wrongheaded as a pack of meteorologists, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. And this year we had a reason for our big expectations: digital.

Talking books have been out there and in some quantity since the early 1980s, but they've never been hot. "When I got into audio it was like a Jane Austen garden party," says Maja Thomas, a 14-year veteran of the business, and currently v-p/publisher of Time Warner Audiobooks. "Now I feel like I'm in a saloon in the Wild West, shooting it out on the digital frontier."

The downloadable audio program pioneered by Don Katz at Audible.com is the place to look for evidence of a coming boom. It offers spoken-word content that can be played on computers, MP3 devices and some telephones, or burned to a CD. In addition to books, Audible carries newspaper and magazine content from publications including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker.

On the books side, Audible has deals to provide material from publishers ranging from Harlequin to Pearson Education. Chairman and CEO Katz said Audible signed up 55,400 new subscribers in the most recent quarter, a 139% increase over the previous year.

Mary Beth Roche, publisher of Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck, noted that Audible says about half of its customers have never listened to an audiobook before. "For an audio publisher, that's very exciting," said Roche, who is also president of the Audio Publishers Association. "I think as an industry we're still at a point where there's tremendous growth opportunity. Download is helping us to achieve some of that growth by interesting people because they're interested in their gadgets." And interest in those gadgets is, well, exploding. In the past three months alone, Apple sold 6.1 million iPods.

While the Walkman was a great advance for the business, the portable CD player was not. Audiobooks always use platforms designed to play music, said Robin Whitten, editor of Audiofile and clambake hostess. The CD had better sound than the cassette, but it's difficult to listen to books on portable CD players. Plus we've all gotten so spoiled by the compression rates we know from our computers, that it was disheartening to learn that, for instance, the new translation of Don Quixote takes up 35 disks. "The great advantage of digital audiobooks is the portability and the staggering amount of storage," said Steve Steinbock, an industry reporter. "You can carry an entire library in something the size of a pack of cards."

Melissa Dittmar, publicist for Random House Audio, explained that while Bret Easton Ellis had not had an audiobook for 10 years, his latest, Lunar Park, was recorded because the iPods and other MP3 players "have produced a new listener base and it's growing."

Mention digital downloads of any material and thoughts run to piracy. But Katz insists that hasn't been a problem with spoken-word content, and that comparisons to music don't apply. "The stealing of content resulted from a specific politicization of the music consumer who had a very, very specific big beef with the music labels."

Whether that holds true over time is one thing, but until now audio has had the opposite challenge—convincing people to try it. "Anecdotally what we hear is that when someone has tested it, assuming they have a good experience, they just think, 'Yeah, this is great! I never realized!' " Roche said. "I spent the first 15 years of my career in books, print books. Just moved to audio five years ago. And when I first started I got a lot of, 'Oh such nice things for the blind.' Or 'Oh, my elderly relatives would love that.' Now at the periodontist, as he's hammering away at my gums, he's telling me what he's listened to as he sat in his driveway (sitting in a stopped car to finish listening to a book is the classic symptom of early onset audiobook fanaticism).

Audiobook sales make up an estimated 4%—10% of the total book publishing market, so we're still something of a cult. This cult, however, is no longer ashamed of itself. We're a cult with an iPod.