Finding time to invest in yourself is smart, especially in today's rocky job market. If you have a commute, as many do, listening to audiobooks is a straightforward way to make productive use of that time. Popping in some thought-provoking or inspirational material can broaden your knowledge and sharpen your effectiveness at work, which will increase the likelihood that you'll stick around longer as your colleagues are getting pink slips.
One of the guys in my church home group is a self-professed audiobook junkie, and he pays for a bunch of them. There's no doubt a market for audiobooks. However, there is a fairly good selection available absolutely free.
Here are a few sources for free audiobooks worth checking out. I've tried to limit the links to free audiobooks that are narrated by humans. There are more sites that have free recordings of digitally-produced audio, but these recordings, though understandable, are probably a second choice behind human-read books mainly because they sound like digitally-produced audio.
- Librivox.org has the aim of providing all public domain books as free audiobooks. It has close to 2,000 free audiobook downloads. Not all of them are in English, but many are.
- Project Gutenberg has a few hundred public-domain works narrated by humans. Jane Austen, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Henry David Thoreau, William Shakespeare, and many others are represented here.
- AudioBooksForFree.com has even more works all freely downloadable. The catch here is that the free versions of the audiobooks are split up into several files and the audio is low-quality, but “bearable,” as the site puts it. Higher-quality and bigger files cost.
- AudioBookQuest.com has 45 free downloads. A bunch of them are teasers but there are a few longer downloads.
- ChristianAudio.com has a monthly free audiobook download with a coupon code.
- SimplyAudiobooks.com also has a free monthly download. This month's is a collection of stories by Guy de Maupassant.
- You can get one free audiobook download during a free 14-day trial of Audible.com. There are 50,000 titles to choose from. Try Audible Now and Get TWO FREE DOWNLOADS!
In today's hectic and demanding world – we can't even have time for ourselves. But we need to, because the world doesn't find much space for obsolete people. As much as we want to make room for self improvement, time is not always on our side. So these audiobooks are amazing. reading while stuck in traffic? No way that's gonna happen.
awesome stuff,
i'm always looking for free stuff to listen to on my journey to work. This list should come in very handy.
ric
Great stuff, thanks. These will occupy some of my boring journeys
There are also audiobooks that you can get if you have a card from the library. They do expire after a while unless you renew them, but they are free.
I've always been a fan of simply checking out audio CDs from my library (and have made contributions earmarked for expanding the collection).
Unfortunately, the "free" audiobooks that Merjolie mentions are not only not free (in either sense) but are a problem in and of themselves. Libraries pay subscription fees to these companies (such as Overdrive), and that money is unavailable for the library's other needs. Furthermore, the lockdown software on these audiobooks means that they'll only play on Microsoft's media players–anyone with a Mac, Linux, or an iPod is out in the cold. (And the publishers wonder why file-sharing is so popular.)
Anyone here ever heard of Usenet?
I always found Gutenberg project to be the best source for free books out there, but some of these other ones are giving them a run for it.