For a while now Apple has offered free music every Tuesday on the iTunes Store; it’s a way to help you discover new music, artists, and albums. When Apple got into TV shows it started offering free episodes. I thought it was a great idea to get people watching shows they might otherwise miss.

Ever since its inception, the iTunes Store has made audiobooks available for download, but they seem to have been relegated to the ’red-headed step-child’ status; that is to say that audiobooks have been largely overlooked and under appreciated.

I use to listen to audiobooks all the time when my commute took up 2 hours out of each weekday. I’d borrow them from the local library on cassettes, and I use to stock up on a few extra whenever I had a road trip planned.

Now my commute is 10 minutes each way, 5 minutes if the traffic lights favor. I had tried to listen to audiobooks recently, but I find that it’s hard to follow the plot when it’s fed to me in 5 to 10 minute snippets.

Still, there are plenty of you who would listen to audiobooks if you found something interesting. Again, we are faced with the same dilemma that’s plagued the iTunes Store since its beginning; that damned 30 second ’preview’.

It’s looks like Apple has finally started to offer substantial portions of audiobooks as free downloads, and I say it’s about friggin’ time.

Don’t expect anything more than the first chapter of a book as a free download, and if you decide to buy the book the price isn’t reduced by the cost of the chapter you already own, you pay full price. What the free download does give you is enough of the story for you to decide if it’s worth your time and money.

Compared to music, audiobooks are pricey suckers; for instance, Stephen King’s new novel, Lisey’s Story, cost US$31.95, Senator Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope clocks in at $18.95, and James Patterson’s latest effort, Cross, will set you back $25.95. True enough, all of these books offer hours of entertainment versus the few minutes per song that music offers or the half hour to 45 minutes of viewing you might enjoy from a TV show, but isn’t that the crux of the matter?

If you download a song and find that you hate it you’ve only wasted about 5 minutes (my guesstimation of the average length of an album track) and 99 cents, a bad TV episode will set you back $1.99 and 45 minutes at most, but an audiobook that sucks will have costs you at least $18.95 and several hours of your time.

So, a free chapter is a very good thing for audiobooks in general and for the iTunes Store in particular; it gives us consumers enough of the book to know if we’d like to hear more. It’s kind of like reading the jacket cover and scanning the first chapter of a book while browsing through Barnes and Nobles, except now you get to do it while sitting at a stop light.

This week The iTunes Store is offering chapters from 2 audiobooks, Facing Your Giants, a self-help non-fiction by Max Lucado, and a sneak peek of Next!, a fictional glimpse of a world where genetics and morality clash by Michael Crichton.

Next! by Michael Crichton

I took a listen to the sneak peek of Next! and I have to say it made me want to buy the book immediately. The last book I read from Michael Crichton was Prey, it was about some malevolent nano-robots and I didn’t much care for it, but this chapter from Next! is intriguing. Download it and see for yourself.

At any rate, I’m glad Apple is including audiobooks in the free downloads, it’s bound to boost sales and make that red-head feel a little more appreciated.

Other freebies at the iTunes Store:

Vern Seward is a writer who currently lives in Orlando, FL. He’s been a Mac fan since Atari Computers folded, but has worked with computers of nearly every type for 20 years.