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Three years ago, Sean Neville was commuting to his new job at a plastics plant near Toronto's Pearson International Airport and often found himself stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on Highway 401.

"It was gridlock," recalls the 32-year-old chief executive officer of Simply Audiobooks Inc. "I would just sit there, and wonder how can I be better using my time."

Frustrated by a 40-minute ride to drive 26 kilometres each way from his home, he craved listening to audio books in his car.

Mr. Neville remembers being eager to rent Good to Great by management guru Jim Collins, but he couldn't find it at a library. With a busy family life, including a second child on the way, he wasn't keen on driving downtown to an audio-book retailer, Spoken Word.

Figuring out how to get audio book rentals sent to his home inspired him to launch an Internet-based business to do just that. Now Simply Audiobooks, based in Oakville, Ont. is North America's largest on-line audio book rental company, with annual revenue of more than $6-million.

The most popular audio book of all time is Steven Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, he said. "For us, it's The Da Vinci Code . . . Everyone wants to know the buzz."

For a monthly fee ranging from $20.95 to $36.95, Canadian customers can go to the website (http://www.simplyaudiobooks.ca) and select two to four audio books on compact disc, sent through the mail.

Now offering about 10,000 titles, Simply Audiobooks is modelled after U.S.-based Netflix Inc., North America's largest on-line movie rental firm. But that distribution model had to be tweaked to adapt to the varying weights of audio books.

"Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is 23 CDs long," Mr. Neville noted. "It's quite a marathon session. We will ship that in pieces."

The fledgling company has enjoyed fast growth since Mr. Neville teamed up with partner Sanjay Singhal, and the pair financed their start-up in mid-2003 with $50,000 in savings. The two men both earned MBAs from Cornell University, but at different times.

Mr. Neville, whose first audio book experience was listening to the Canadian Securities Course on cassettes, quit his job as vice-president of sales and marketing at a plastics firm to launch Simply Audiobooks.

Mr. Singhal, 41, who also has a master's degree in engineering, is the company's chairman and chief marketing officer. He had been involved in three other start-ups, but only one involving voicemail technology was successful. He sold his interest in Toronto-based Mpathix Inc. to jump into the book venture.

No one else was involved in the rent-by-mail model. But the two managed to find valuable background information for their venture by sifting through 10K filings by U.S. public companies such as Netflix, and also Audible Inc., which sells downloadable audio books.

Within months of launching Simply Audiobooks, the duo discovered their plan had flaws. And they had to switch gears quickly. While they originally targeted corporate sales in Canada, they discovered their best prospects were consumers in the United States.

The U.S. market now represents 95 per cent of sales, with audio books shipped from offices in Buffalo and Las Vegas. "Our strategy in the beginning was ready, fire and aim," Mr. Neville said with a laugh.

With an Internet business, they learned the importance of quickly registering website addresses for future expansion, as well as variations and misspellings of domain names. It costs about $10 a year for a Web address, and buying as many as possible can save a businesses from future headaches, they say.

The key is to prevent "domain squatters" or even competitors from registering Web addresses similar to the name of a company, said Mr. Singhal. "You have to get them all, or other people will get them-- that is, hijack them -- and then charge you money to buy them later."

Simply Audiobooks missed registering simplyaudio.com, a short-form of its domain name. That was picked up by a U.S. competitor, Jiggerbug, which entered the same business a year later. "There was a fair bit of traffic that was going to jiggerbug.com that was really looking for us," Mr. Singhal recalled.

But Simply Audiobooks discovered that Jiggerbug forgot to register a domain containing a misspelling of its name with only one "g," and managed to do a trade. Mr. Singhal took the CEO of Jiggerbug out for a steak dinner in Las Vegas, and swapped domain names.

"Having good relationships with competitors is really important," he noted. "The biggest problem is getting people to know about audio books. So we can exchange information . . . and grow the overall market."

The company is sticking with audio books, as opposed to branching out into movie and game rentals. "We decided that we wanted to own the audio book space," and become a world leader, said Mr. Neville. "We want to give audio books in whatever flavour you like."

While the core business is still rentals, Simply Audiobooks also sells cassette tapes and CDs through its website, and offers downloads of audio books for MP3 players or cellphones.

And last month, it entered into the world of bricks and mortar by buying Spoken Word, Canada's largest audio-book only retail shop, and opened another from scratch in Oakville.

It's simply another way to introduce more consumers to the audio book world, and draw them to the on-line service, said Mr. Neville. "We feel that it is best done through a face-to-face format."

Last spring, Simply Audiobooks expanded overseas with a new office in Manchester, England. It is also looking at countries such as Australia, New Zealand and India.

"We are not messing around," Mr. Neville said. "My thought is that somebody is going to win this. Why can't it be us?"