In preparation for my upcoming long road time, I’ve been organizing some audio books to fill some of the time/space. There is a veritable bag of gold from the Internet Archive. I also found a decent selection of free (public domain) Adventure Audio Books.
A small problem with them is that these are really a set of audio files (duh)– so if you are say, listening to them on a long road trip, you have to remember where you left off. However, I’ve found using the $9.95 Audio Book Builder app (Mac OS only), its easy to turn a pile of audio book files into an .m4b which plays on iDevices as an Audiobook (meaning it remembers where you left off and has handy chapter navigation hooks).
So far, I have converted the following from their freely shared audio file versions to Audiobook (m4b files), and am sharing them back at you.
- 1984 (George Orwell) 276Mb Audiobook made from files found at Internet Archive.
- Animal Farm (George Orwell) 35Mb Audiobook made from files found at Internet Archive.
- Logan’s Run (William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson) 66 Mb Audiobook made from files found at Broken Sea.
- Call of Cthulhu (HP Lovecraft) 45 Mb Audiobook made from files.. I forget where these came from! But LibriVox has a great collection of Lovecraft in the public domain
- Short Stories from Edgar Alan Poe 147 Mb Audiobook made from files found at Internet Archive.
I also have about 20 CDs for Life, Keith Richard’s autobiography (read by Johnny Depp) that I plan to chug into m4b format soon (sorry, can’t really share them).
PS- I have found Poe is hard to listen to while diving! It required a lot of concentration…
And Logan’s Run, that is a nice touch, I love this playlist for your storytelling adventure, rad. Poe is hard cause he is all good—his language is the change we need to make, how would we say it? Where? With whom?
If you run out, try http://podiobooks.com. While you might not recognize the titles or authors, there are over 500 works there … some good, some not so, but all free and organized as podcasts so it’s a bit easier to keep track of where you are.
All the books are also available on the iTunes Music Store as free audio downloads.
[Disclaimer: Eight of those 500+ books are mine. There’s a lot of good stuff there that’s not mine. It’s a great way to fill an mp3 player with road eating content for free.]
The links don’t seem to work.
Doh, what a moron am I. I created the directory with a typo- links should now work.