I got some great news in my inbox yesterday -- Audible.com is now carrying all four of Stephen King's Dark Tower novels as unabridged (yes, unabridged!) audio books.

The books have been out in audio format for a few years but I never picked them up, and once I became an Audible subscriber, I was occupied with other King titles (like The Talisman, The Black House, Bag of Bones, and Dreamcatcher), all of which are unabridged, and most of which weigh in at 20+ hours. For a commuter like me, having twenty hours of a much-loved book available on my iPod translates directly into twenty-hours of highway sanity.

Fortunately, my time with King's other works has paid off, and now the Dark Tower books are out. The book's vary in length -- the first book (which is a slender volume in its print edition) is a mere 7 hours, 24 minutes. But The Drawing of the Three (Dark Tower II) is 12 hours, 27 minutes, The Wastelands (Dark Tower III) is 17 hours, 43 minutes and the four tome, Wizard and Glass (Dark Tower IV) weighs in at a whopping 26 hours, 56 minutes.

That last one's freaking great, 'cause Wizard and Glass, while a good book, is a damn long one -- and one I don't really have time to read, what with a 7 month old now eagerly crawling her way around the house. The only real downside is that my $20 a month subscription at Audible only nets me one book a month, so it'll take me four months to download all of these (unless someone gets me a gift certificate for Christmas...). Still, I don't mind the wait -- I'm just thrilled to know that they're out there and that I can get them ...eventually.