If you download a song and find that you hate it, you've only wasted about 5 minutes and 99 cents, and a bad TV episode will set you back $1.99 and 45 minutes at most. An audiobook that sucks, however, will cost you at least $18.95 and, assuming you force yourself to listen to the whole thing, 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, in that it gives us consumers just enough of a book to know if we'd like to hear more. It's kind of like reading the jacket cover of the hardcopy and scanning the first chapter while browsing through Barnes and Noble, except now you get to do it while sitting at a stop light.