Finally, it’s summer time! Since I work in a public school system, that means eight or nine weeks working with few people around. Lots of time working alone. So I’ve been loading up my iPod with lots of free audio books.
The sources of free audio books on the World Wide Web is pretty wide. I’ve written about a few authors who podcast in the past. There are many others out there. Here are some sources I found for books I wanted to read:
For classic stories and older tales that are now in the public domain then check out LibriVox. I downloaded ten days of audio for my summer listening pleasure. Between my regular podcast listening and these stories then my summer alone time should be full.
A few things I might suggest about exploring free audio books is that you should be prepared for wide degrees of quality recordings. Some are very good and professional. Most are very fine amature recordings. But some are downright bad and the quality distracts from the story itself.
Then there is the telling of the tale itself. Like a good joke, some people can repeat a good joke and get everyone laughing. While others, like me, can ruin a great joke with poor delivery. This is true of narrators as well. So I advise picking a chapter and having a test listen before spending lots of time and bandwidth downloading hundreds of megabytes of audio files. I just can’t hear the story through some narrators tone and inflection. But some narrators are true actors and can really add to a story with their voices.
I’ll report back in a week or so with a report some of the first stories I’ve listened to.