It's just such a great medium. Fairly resilient, incredibly easy to use, compact, cheap ish.
And of course there's the heady dose of nostalgia for us old gits :)
If anyone has any recommendations I'd love to hear them. Top one from me has to be the BBC dramatised Lord of the Rings adaptation which I myself have been listening to off and on since I was around 5 or 6
For kids: Just William (read by Martin Jarvis) and PG Wodehouse Wooster books (don't recall who read that).
Early Eddie Izzard shows were also memorably good as audio. Very quotable.
There's a gigantic, not always unofficial, archive of Just a Minute online, which is excellent car journey material. This is the first 5 series, but there's 80-plus series of it in total https://archive.org/details/Just-A-Minute
You lose a bit of sound quality but there’s no internet-cloud-based crap to deal with. You don’t need to worry about the company failing and bricking the toy or the Chinese spying on your kids. Also, they’re mostly just mechanical machines with a simple circuit so actually fixable, you can pick up a 30 year old broken player off eBay and chances are a rubber belt has just perished somewhere.
The Harry Potter audio tapes are good. It’s read by Stephen Fry and he’s great!
since "compact cassette" is the actual trademark®, I can't help but think you might've been unduly influenced here.
My own dad had a Akamai T19 cloud computing system and he would give me all the oggs and flacs and mp3s off the cloud from his Akamai system
Yes, it's pretty mad if you think if what you would need to do to replace it.
Either you have a system with QR codes or simple ID chip to refer to some URL. Now you need a server, media licensing agreements and somewhere to store progress information, subscriptions, on and on. And the eternal temptation to abuse the data if it's in the cloud.
Or you store all the audio in the card, and now you need a memory chip and PCB in every card, plus some proprietary USB/WiFi/Bluetooth device to write the cards.
And the barely-makes-contact head system is genius too rather than sliding gold contacts. And it just has paper label inserts.
The only real down sides of cassettes other then the obvious physicality if you don't like that, is they integrate badly into modern cars, have a fairly short run length (and occasionally get chewed up). And if lots of need to be authored quickly, that's too bad!