Santa was good to me and I got an MP3 player for Christmas (Sansa)!
Santa knows I spend at least 50% of my time wearing headphones. The thing is I’m not a music person, I love to hear words. I’ve been digging through our library’s audio book collection for years now, but, especially for nonfiction, it’s hard to always find what I want.
The near limitless availability online thrills me, but I can’t sort out all the sites. I’ve been trying to find a site to compare sites, but I’m getting too much advertising, not enough commentary.
Where do you download from? How much do you spend? How many hours of spoken audio do you listen to a week?
Can you at least give me some tips for googling so I can find comparative information?
The Teaching Company has some excellent lectures, and more and more of their lectures are now available as downloads. Good quality stuff.
Audible.com also has interesting non-fiction to download. I get a 50 minute summary of The Wall Street Journal sent to my Treo 650 each morning. Audible.com allows you to download books by chapter.
I use audible.com, which has a pretty decent selection of books. I only listen to fiction, and they have a nice mix of recent and older stuff. I think I pay something like $22/month for two audiobooks a month. I don’t know how this compares with other sites, but it’s much cheaper than buying books on CD at a bookstore ($30-$60 each).
You have to make sure your mp3 player is supported (they have a list on their site), although most recent ones are so you’re probably fine. You can also burn books to CD – their software automatically breaks the books into chunks to spread across multiple CDs. I’ve used audible for about six months now and so far have been very happy with them.
A new project has just recently been started at Librivox.org to create free audiobooks. Of course, they can only be free if we don’t have to pay readers or authors, which means all the books there are public domain, and all the readers are volunteers, generally just average, untrained people, with a microphone and a copy of Audacity. However, the quality (at least from the ones I’ve heard, and judging by word of mouth) is surprisingly good.
Anyway, worth checking out for someone like you, I would think.
Podcast.com has links to many sides that provide free MP3 content. Not all of it is books, but most of it is voice. NPR also provides free MP3 content.