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!

Introduction to Free Online Audiobooks

Sometimes (OK usually) I come a little slowly to the benefits of new technology. Its not that I don’t understand how it works, it just takes me a while to really see how it will make my own life better. Take MP3s for instance. Sure, I thought, handy little device, no more CDs to get scratched and you can take it anywhere. But I’m not a teenager who has to constantly be listening to music. In fact, I’m a stay at home mom so when I want music I turn on the radio. Why would I need an MP3 player?


Then one day I got an audio book that I wanted to listen to repeatedly. Unfortunately, not everyone in the house felt the same way. So I figured I would pick up an inexpensive portable CD player and all of my problems would be solved.


Well, it didn’t quite work that way. Every time I moved, the player would skip. And since I was usually cleaning while listening, there was a lot of skipping. This of course was too annoying to tolerate. My first plan was to buy a better quality CD player. But then it hit me.


Why not rip the sound tracks to mp3 files and load the whole book onto an MP3 player. (Aren’t I a genius?) The advantages seemed pretty appealing – no more worrying about scratched CDs, no more having to switch CDs in the middle of the book, no more skipping and the player would be a lot smaller to carry around. Small enough to fit in a pocket or on a handy armband. They cost a bit more than I really wanted to spend, but the advantages made it seem more than worth it.


Yep I finally realized how this new technology would benefit me personally. So I convinced my husband that I needed one for my birthday.


For a while, everything was great. In fact, it was so nice that I found myself listening a whole lot more. And after a while I wanted something new to listen to. Boy was I in for a shock. Sure there were a few audio books out there for around $10, but most were in the range of $25-40. Being a one income family with three kids to keep in clothes, shoes and sporting gear, that was a pretty hefty expense for me. Even if I was “improving my mind”.


So off I went on a journey to figure out how I could get more content without depriving my kids of new shoes. And I found so much great stuff that I wanted to share. After all, everybody should be able to improve their mind while still getting their kids new shoes!