I’ve just discovered it this weekend. http://librivox.org/ has available for free download public domain recordings of public domain books. Anyone can volunteer to read, so they’re not professional recordings, but many of them are very high quality and sound quite professional.
So far I’ve downloaded 26 books, an incredible array of works from Tom Swift and Peter Pan to Aristotle and Plato. I’ve got books by Dickens, Twain, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, Zane Grey, Dante, Thoreau, and Poe. I’m out of room on my hard drive!
I listen to a lot of audio books while I work, and mostly get them from the library–but our library is small, most of their audio books are popular fiction, and I’ve gone through everything they have worth listening to twice. I can’t afford to buy them at the rate I go through them, and renting audio books is stupidly expensive–the audiobooks version of netflix is around $30/month for two books. This is like striking gold for me.
Anybody else into it? Can anyone recommend particular readers, or particular gems I should be sure to grab?