A Moving Experience for Bookish Drivers : Literature: County library becomes the first in the nation to rent audio ‘books’ by mail.

Too busy crawling along in freeway traffic to get to the library, much less read a book? Well, the County of Los Angeles Public Library doesn’t want to hear any more excuses.

In a pioneering service aimed at the region’s millions of road-weary commuters, the county library will mail you an audiotape of a book that you can pop into your car’s cassette player to help lull the miles away.

Taped books are becoming increasingly popular and are a standard offering in public libraries, but the county library is apparently the first in the nation to mail cassettes to patrons, following in the footsteps of commercial companies that rent tapes by mail.

“We’re the only public library offering this,” said Cindy Miller, special project librarian for the county system. “It’s a result of surveying our market and seeing a need for this. We have an awful lot of people stuck on freeways who can’t get into a library.”

With a 1,500-title catalogue that is growing, the library’s 5-month-old Audio Express program has one of the largest collections of unabridged audio books in the country, Miller said.

For a $10-a-book fee, radio-numbed commuters can rent full-length readings of current fiction, mysteries, self-improvement and business management books, romances, classics, horror stories and even Westerns. Patrons can keep the tapes for 30 days from the date they receive them.

Although the library directly serves unincorporated areas of the county as well as a number of Southeast, San Gabriel Valley and South Bay cities, a library card--and access to audio express--is free to any state resident.

Mysteries, business and self-improvement tapes have been the most popular so far, Miller said, while the Westerns have been a little slow to catch on. “(Western aficionados) are a very distinct little group. I guess they haven’t discovered audio yet.”

When it comes to picking a title, Lisa Scott, a book tape enthusiast and one of Audio Express’s first customers, has some advice.

“It does behoove you to be careful of what you listen to in the car,” warned Scott, a San Gabriel Valley resident who is always tuned to a book when she drives to and from her downtown Los Angeles job as a county prosecutor.

“When I was listening to ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles,’ I was crying so hard, I was afraid I was going to run off the road.”

Fans insist there’s nothing like a good, professional reading to blot out the agonies of daily travel in the Los Angeles Basin.

The radio “really doesn’t take the pain out of commuting and a book does,” said Bob Jordan, a La Habra resident and county prosecutor who shares book tapes with Scott and others in their office. “You almost look forward to getting back into your car.”

For Jordan, who’s now driving his way through “Prizzi’s Honor,” it’s also about the only way he can spend time with a book. He has a 2-year-old and a 3-year-old, and they “won’t permit me to read in their presence.”

Scott is an avid reader who shunned the idea of listening to recorded books before she finally succumbed several years ago. “I kept saying I love to read, but I don’t like to be read to.” Now she’s a convert who says that she’ll even listen to recordings of books she wouldn’t have the discipline to actually read.

She does point to one problem, though. “We never know whether to say ‘I read this book’ or ‘I listened to this book.’ ”

Her compromise: “I read this book on tape.”

Scott also advises that people should suppress any Puritan urges to rent something enriching when they first start listening to book recordings. She took out “Moby Dick” and regretted it.

“Listen to something trashy,” she counseled, “Something you’re really going to like.”

The library has a toll free number for audio express, (800) 253-0591.