But most big websites provide similar selections. Should we be limited to mainstream just because we choose to read using audiobooks? Not at all. If you love unique books, unknown authors and books you generally don’t find in the usual book collections, you can still play the free audiobook game.

These 7 websites provide very interesting books, but the user experience is not always perfect. The books are there, and they are all decent quality, but you might have to dig for some really interesting finds. But hey, that’s all part of the fun!

Lit2Go

Lit2Go is an audiobook project containing both books and poems, and is run by Florida’s Educationsl Technology Clearinghouse. This is a nice collection of fiction books, educational books, poems, short stories and more, which you can browse by author, title, reading level or subject matter.

Each book is available to download as MP3 or PDF, so Lit2Go can be used as an interesting source for eBooks as well. You can also view each book as plain text on a webpage, if you wish to listen on your computer and follow while you read.

Internet Archive

Internet Archive includes, among other things, a sizable collection of audiobooks and poetry. While not the easiest site to browse, you can focus your attention on either regular browsing by title/keyword/subject (no author, for some reason), or check out the right sidebar for a list of the most downloaded audiobooks and some staff picks.

Since the website consolidated several collections, not all books are available in all formats. Some are available as MP3 only, while others are available as Ogg as well. The files are usually for individual chapters, though some books are available as a single download.

The Story Spieler

If Internet Archive seems crowded and confusing, The Story Spieler is one reader who hosts his files on Internet Archive, but also has his own blog where you can browse only his books. The books in The Story Spieler are narrated by a retired TV and radio broadcaster, and his choice of stories is both varied and interesting.

Browse the books using the huge category list which contains everything from history to Rudyard Kipling and from children’s stories to science fiction. Seriously, this guy is diverse. There are lots of books by famous classic authors, and a lot of titles you’ve probably never heard of. The books are available in MP3 format, and files are usually small, as appropriate to blog posts. Longer books are divided into chapters, which you can download individually.

Voices In The Dark

While not being a huge collection, Voice in the Dark is one of those places you can’t help but fall in love with. This is an intriguing collection of mystery, fantasy and poetry, mixed with some legends, fairy tales and much more. All are read by real people and all are available in both low quality and high quality MP3s.

While the whole website seems to have been preserved from the 90′s, the book collection is really interesting, and the readers are very diverse. You can easily browse the collection by genre, title or author. It’s hard to tell if the website is still being updated, but one can hope. This is one truly unique find.

FreeAudioBooks

If you’re looking for something a bit more mainstream, FreeAudioBooks is probably the most classical collection on this list. This is a diverse collection which features many true classics along with children’s stories, lots of non-fiction audios and many more genres to choose from. Whether you’re into plays, biographies or classic humor, you’re going to find it all here.

All files are available in the ZIP format, inside which you’d find a separate MP3 for each chapter.

Tor.com

If you’re a true sci-fi and fantasy buff , be sure to check out Tor.com. This is a large collection of short stories by famous or not-so-famous authors, which are available for download in MP3 format. If you’re into eReaders, most books are also available in Kindle, Nook and iPad formats. Scattered among the stories, you’ll also find the odd comic strip. These are not available in audio, but are a nice addition to the general experience.

When you click a story, you’ll usually get the text itself. To get the audio, search the left sidebar for the word “listen”. This is where you can download the audio. Not all stories have audio, but a good amount of them do.

Pulp Daily

Remember the good old days of pulp fiction? Well, I don’t. Pulp stories are an interesting glimpse into the 1930s, and could be really entertaining to read. I’ve heard a lot of these pulp magazine stories, but who has time to locate them and read them? This is where Pulp Daily comes in handy.

Pulp Daily is a blog, which unfortunately was not updated since January, but still contains a lot of recorded pulp magazine stories. The author was posting a chapter every few days, and you can browse the archives for some interesting stories from the blog’s past. You will have to download each story chapter by chapter, but this might be worth it for an excellent way to listen to a piece of entertainment history.

On the left you’ll find links to several other free audiobook blogs, these are all interesting finds and you should go ahead and to check them all out.

Bottom Line

Don’t be deterred if you don’t find a good read on the main page of these websites. Part of the fun is in the browsing and finding, and all these websites offer some really good finds. And if you don’t have time, you can always pick something at random!

Want to share your experience from these websites? Know of more interesting audiobook websites? We’re waiting for your comments!

Image credit: Shutterstock

Audiobooks are my perfect companions while I’m driving to and from work. Without even realizing it, I’ve finished tons of books on the road – from suspense sci-fi novels to self-help masterpieces. I would never have found the time to read those literature pieces had I done it the traditional way.

The Need To Convert

There are downloadable audiobooks all over the net, both free and paid. Sometimes you can find free audiobooks from famous authors as part of their book promotion campaigns. You can use search engines to start your treasure hunting, and you can also use this article as a starting point.

The Internet is not the only place to find audiobooks. You could buy them in the physical form of CD’s. But nobody carries around portable CD players anymore. To enjoy your audiobook CDs on the road, you have to convert them to digital files format such as MP3. You can use iTunes to convert these CDs to MP3′s.

The problem is, ordinary MP3′s are not audiobooks. Due to their nature, audiobook files have certain traits different from ordinary MP3′s. For example: aside from having its own library, audiobooks are automatically bookmarked. So if you stop an audiobook in the middle and play something else, then go back to the audiobook, it will start playing where you left off. Audiobooks can also be played faster or slower than the normal speed in iPods.

The Importing Process

There are several steps needed to convert CDs to itunes audiobook files. The first one is the usual iTunes’ audio CD import.

Just put the CD into your Mac’s optical drive, and iTunes will ask you whether or not you want to import the CD.

After clicking “Yes“, iTunes will try to get the CD data from Gracenotes. This process can be triggered manually via the “Advanced > Get CD Track Names” menu.

Then iTunes will show the process of “Querying Database” in its screen.

And the importing process will begin.

The Audiobook Conversion Process

After successfully turning the CD tracks into MP3′s, you need to convert those tracks into audiobook files. This process can be done easily in iTunes.

First, select the tracks that you want to convert. And choose “Get Info” from the File menu (or use Command + I).

Choose the “Options” tab and change the “Media Kind” from Music into Audiobook.

You can also adjust other settings to make the files more “audiobooky” .

• Set the “Equalizer Preset” to Vocal Booster if your files consist of spoken words only.
• Set the “Remember position” to Yes
• Set the other settings according to your preferences.

Click “OK” and those files will be moved from Music into the Audiobooks library.

Combining The Files

For those who prefer one audiobook file instead of several MP3 tracks, you can join the converted files using Join Together – available as a free basic version and $7 shareware Plus version.

This application will combine audio files into one AAC music of audiobook files. There’s the option to “chapterize” the file with pointers to the individually joined tracks.

The usage is pretty straightforward: you choose the files (by dragging and dropping or by selecting it in iTunes), adjust the settings, and click “Proceed”

Do you listen to audiobooks? Do you know other alternative ways to convert them from a CD into digital files?  If so, please share using the comments below!

I’m trying to get through my Instrumentation Technician apprenticeship as fast as I can, but between my day job and my night gig, I don’t have a lot of study time. But what I do have is a fair amount of time in my truck, traveling from site to site. Hmmm, light bulb, convert my text books into MP3′s that I can play on my iPod. Hmmm, bigger lightbulb! Write an article on that.

Step 1: Get a Good Free Text to Speech (TTS) Program

Of the three Text to Speech software apps I tested with my text file of tongue twisters, the one I liked best was Spesoft’s Free Text To MP3 Speaker. I also tried Speakonia and Ultra Hal Text to Speech Reader. Unfortunately, those two do not convert the text directly to Mp3 format – just .wav. Other than that, they didn’t have as many choices on recording quality as Spesoft’s.

Step 2: Get a Good Book

There is a veritable cornucopia of copyright expired books out on the web. Project Gutenberg is probably the best known. Go on over, search for a topic and find the book you would like to read. Now download it. Please consider making a donation to Project Gutenberg if you can. It really is a great resource that has been going for about 30 years now.

I suppose you could do this with an eBook you own, as long as it wasn’t for public performance and you didn’t upload it on the web somewhere, and you had the express written consent of Major League Baseball, its broadcasters and affiliates. That’s just an opinion – do so at your own risk.

Step 3: Edit the Text as Necessary

You could skip this step if you don’t have the time. Keep in mind that older books often have different spellings or curious characters that might not be read properly by your TTS program.

Step 4: Open the Book in Your TTS

Well, this means that you open the book in your Text to Speech software application.

Okay, here’s more details. Click on the Load Text from File button.

From there, navigate to the text file you want converted. Select that text file, and click on Open.

Now, your text should appear in the main part of the program, just like this!

I take credit for creating the grumbling gremlin tongue twister. It came to me as I was thinking about a gremlin that was, um, grumbling. The car, not the monster.

Step 5: Let the TTS Do It’s Thing

This is the time saver part. Just hit Record and Create Audio File, save it with the file name you want and walk the dog. Don’t have a dog? Walk the neighbour’s dog – just tell them first or it gets ugly, and the neighbour thinks you’re taking the dog for that ritual you had planned for later. Or something like that.

Spesoft Test to Speech software also allows you to choose different voices, adjust the speed, pitch and volume of the voice as well as tweak the recording quality. Everybody seems to have different preferences, so you might just want to play around with that for a bit. Personally, I set the Output Quality and Sample Rate as high as possible. My iPod doesn’t have much on it. Not much of a music guy.

Now you have an Mp3 of the book that you finally wanted to read. Pop it on the iPod, crank up the Shakespeare and get ready to cruise the strip. That’s kind of lame isn’t it? Well, hot librarians might dig it.

Image Credit : yum9me

The majority of the employed today, have somewhat of a commute. Whether it be 10 minutes or 45, some type of audio activity is necessary to keep us from falling asleep at the wheel. Audiobooks are slowly becoming an extremely popular option for this and LibriVox brings you a free option to listen to them.

LibriVox is a user driven public domain audiobook library for any and all to listen to. They allow anyone to take any one of the thousands of public domain audiobooks, record their own voice, and distribute for all to listen to. We’ve briefly mentioned LibriVox in 2007, talking about “Joining The User-Generated Content Revolution“, but I thought it needed a little more recognition.

What separates LibriVox from audiobook sites like Audible, is the fact that a majority of the books are read by several different readers, usually by chapter. It makes the book not only unique, but keeps your interest, because you never know what that next reader’s voice is going to sound like. Such as in the below example of Aesop’s Fables, each read by four different people.

As you can see in the above screenshot as well, you have a few different audio formats to choose from, including a lower and higher quality MP3, plus OGG as well. Nothing to sign-up for or register, all audio files can be directly downloaded right from the website.

Librivox allows you to browse to the entire catalog yourself, or use their handy search engine to find what you’re looking for by author, or by title. The interface isn’t all that pretty, but it gets the job done. According to Wikipedia, in March of 2009, the site had 2000+ recorded titles ranging from short fiction stories, to lengthy novels, and even poetry. At last count, there are recordings in 45+ languages.

Some of the more famous titles you might recognize include the 9/11 commission report, Pride and Prejudice, Capital and their most popular title “The Return of Native” by Thomas Hardy. There are even religious titles, including an English version of the Koran, and several reads of the Holy Bible. Just about every genre is covered in their collection.

The other part of Librivox that can keep you entertained, is where you can actually take part in recording your own book. As long as it falls into “Public Domain“, with a audio recording application like Audacity, and a PC microphone or headset, you can delve into recording your own voice for a chapter, or an entire book! They require no prior experience either. As long as your voice is audible, you can volunteer and release your voice to the world.

There really is no other site out there like LibriVox that I could find. There are a few free audiobooks and audiobook sites out there, but none that are driven by you, the everyday reader. It’s very unique in that way, and I know I will one day dive into reading my very own audiobook, and let my voice be heard.

Do you have any free audiobook sites that you like? Do you see yourself recording your very own book one day?