Librivox

If you saw my Pride and Prejudice post, and listened to the audio, you already know about Librivox. Librivox is like Wiki Audiobooks. It's a collective effort which creates free audiobooks for public use. They mostly take texts from Gutenberg.org, and make amateur recordings. I don't use the word amateur disparagingly. This is a wonderful effort by book lovers who are providing top quality free content. This is an excellent use of the internet (unlike dontforward.com).

They welcome volunteers to read short works, individual book chapters, or even whole books. You can give as well as receive! I just may buy myself a microphone and join the fun.

My MP3 player

I mentioned in my first post that I listen to audiobooks on a cheap MP3 player. I wanted to show it to you, because I'm an opponent of the modern trend of spending money like there's no tomorrow.

No. This won't do everything that an ipod does, but all you really need is an ability to listen to your files. Everything else is just a matter of status symbols.

This is the Panasonic SL-SX470. It cost me $29 at Wal Mart. I chose this one because it plays MP3s on CD and on CDRW. That's an important feature. An audiobook on CD might take up many disks. You can probably store War and Peace on a single disk in MP3 format. The CDRW capability is what really sells it. If you want to listen to an audio file that's not very large, you would waste a lot of space using a regular disk. Re-burn your same disk over and over if you like. Perfect for podcasts.

I'm not recommending that you run out and buy this model. I saw other ones that would do the same thing. I'm just saying that you don't have to spend hundreds of dollars to enjoy downloadable audio. Let's face it, when you factor in the cost of an ipod, you might as well just buy commercial audiobooks. Spending hundreds of dollars to listen to free content makes no sense.

Ciao,

Jeff

Podiobooks.com - Serialized audio books in podcast form

Most of the free audiobooks out there are in the public domain, which means they are usually older books (in fact, almost always). Some of you may prefer newer books. PodioBooks provides a venue for living authors to share their works with the public through audio podcasts.

I don't have an ipod, and I haven't really done the podcast thing yet, but podcasting is just a means of distributing audio files. As long as you have a means to listen to MP3s you can take advantage of podcasts.

Pride and Prejudice

A Jane Austen classic, in podcast format. This page includes a link to add their RSS feed to your My Yahoo page (which I did.)

Archive.org

Archive.org is best known as the place where you can pull up old versions of websites, so you can see content that has been removed. At least, that's what I always used it for.

But they also offer many audio files, including music and audiobooks. Here's the audiobook page. Unfortunately, some books are divided by chapter, and there's no one page that links to all the chapters. When you see a partial book, do a search for that title, then the search results will find the other chapters.

All recordings seem to be read by humans, not computers, as far as I can tell.

The Communist Manifesto

Have you ever wondered what radical ideas stirred millions of people to developing an unworkable society? I have.

The Communist Manifesto is one of the most important documents of the 19th century, and had probably even more effect on the 20th.

Make Your Own Audiobooks

No, I'm not proposing that you record yourself reading your paper books. This is the future!

I've started making my own audiobooks with a text2speech program called TextAloud. I shelled out the money for the registered version and the upgraded voices. Frankly, the program is only worthwhile if you add the upgraded voices. They pronounce words much better, and have a higher bitrate. They recognize question marks, and add the intonations. When comparing the same passages read by the free voice, and the premium ones, there's no comparison. Still, the voices sound more or less computer generated, but not to the point of distraction. I found that the first book I listened to was a little distracting, but by the second one, the stilted speech didn't bother me.

Then I bought a cheap MP3 player from Wal Mart. Actually, it's a portable CD player, but it plays MP3s from CD-RW disks. That means I can re-use the same disk over and over. Doesn't sound like a big deal until you look at the file sizes of the audiobooks. Don't be surprized when your audiobook fills 30 audio CDs. So re-filling the same CD looks like a great idea to me, and MP3 format means it'll all fit on a single CD.

Then, of course, you need some text for the software to read. I've started with The Gutenberg Project, which can keep me reading for years. They have thousands of titles.

Gutenberg also has many titles in audio format, so you can get started listening without buying TextAloud. Some consist of computer-generated audiobooks, and other are human read. I spot checked the computer generated stuff, and found it to be of lesser quality than TextAloud. It's your call.

There are other audiobooks and texts free on the web, and if you know which title you're looking for, you can just download and listen.

Be aware that nearly all audiobooks you find will be in the public domain. In other words, they're probably old books, dating back a hundred years or more. Not all of them, but most. Some authors publish open-source works that you can download freely.

If you come across audio material in a format that your MP3 player won't play, fear not. There's a very nice program called Total Recorder that captures any sound that comes through your sound card, and converts it to MP3. Again, this is not free software, but well worth the money.

I will be posting links to free audiobook resources as I find them.

Happy reading!