Thursday, May 24, 2007

Where to Find The Free Audio Book Downloads

The Internet abounds with free resources, but tracking them down can be a time consuming job. Fortunately some people have made the job a lot easier.

Due to the wonderful ideas of a few and the hard work of many, it is possible to get access to a lot of public domain material. Public domain material is that which copyright has expired and is now freely available to the public.

The hard part used to be getting your hands on it, but now a few sites have made a wealth of public domain material easily available to the public. These include Project Gutenberg, Librivox and Literal Systems.

Project Gutenberg has over 20,000 free books in their catalog that you can download and read. They also have free audio books, although their selection is smaller. They have computer read books available here and human read ones here.

Librivox is on online collection of public domain audio books. Their goal is to make all public domain books available as audio books. Is that a great goal or what? Right now they are well on their way with over 600 titles available as of this writing. And in case you were wondering, all of the material is read by real human beings who have generously given of their time and efforts.

Literal Systems is another site dedicated to providing free public domain audio books. Their list of titles isn't as huge as Librivox, but they still have some material worth listening to!

So if you have any classic material on your "to listen to" list, head on over to the above sites and start whittling it down for free! If you don't have any classic material on you list, then consider adding some. Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Daniel Defoe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Aesop, Frank L. Baum, Charlotte Bronte and more await you.

And if any of the above sites make a significant contribution to your life consider a donation and/or volunteering some of your time to them to keep them going.

Happy Listening!