The Great Geek Manual

This weeks links are a collection of all the best sites on the Internet to find audiobooks.

Audio Books For Free is an enormous collection of classic stories of all genres. The 8kb mp3 files are of “bearable quality” and free without registration. Higher quality versions, up to 48kb, can be purchased for an additional membership fee.

Audio Literature Odyssey is a literary podcast hosted by voice actor Nikolle Doolin. Every day a new, beautifully read installment of a classic story. The current selection is limited, but it’s expanding daily.

The Digital Book Index is a storehouse of over 130,000 titles. About 90,000 of the e-books are free for browsing or download. The site requires registration, and the navigation is difficult to understand on the first visit, but the selection and audio quality are satisfying.

Free Classic AudioBooks is a straight-forward site with a small collection of classic audiobooks, available in either MP3 or m4b audio book formats. Half of the titles are read by humans, half are text to speech.

Great Books is a robust selection of great books, professionally read chapter by chapter on a beautifully designed website. Recent classics have included Animal Farm and Frankenstein. Feed

LibriVox is a well-formatted website currently hosting just over 800 free classic (public domain) audiobooks. This site should really be your first stop when searching for an audiobook. This site is the largest and best kept collection on the net. LibriVox books are read by volunteers, and you too can lend a hand by reading a book into their site. Feed

Literal Systems, along with LibriVox are the services that record audiobooks for Project Gutenberg. Books can be downloaded in flac or mp3 format. Feed

Podiobooks – is a fantastic site offering complete, free, serialized audio books, via rss. This site doesn’t offer your run-of-the-mill classics, but rather independent and self-published books. At first blush, the selection is a bit discouraging, but after rummaging through the site, it turns out there a few real gems. In particular, if you’re a fan of Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes In Amber, try listening to John Lenahan’s Shadowmagic. Mur Lafferty’s Lessons From A Geek Fu Master is pretty entertaining as well. Feed

The Spoken Alexandria Project is a very small Creative Commons library of public domain readings. The readings are high quality and available in aac, mp3, ogg vorbis, and podcast format. The highlight of the site is undoubtedly Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis Feed