Loving the Classics from Librivox

I’m a huge fan of Audiobooks since I barely have time to read anymore, but during the day, my job gives me the chance to listen to books without it interfering with my work. Over the past few months I’ve been able to listen to all the books by Dan Brown, including The Lost Symbol, and now I’m going back and listening to all those Classic stories that have been on my list thanks to Librivox.

As you well know, Librivox is the project to take stories that have gone into the public and make audio recordings of them. Considering the thousands of stories available it’s literally tens of thousands of hours worth of material that’s available. It’s enough to keep you busy for years to come. Over the past week I’ve listened to Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And while all the recordings may not be equal the few I’ve listened to have been extremely well done without any background distractions.

You can always download the MP3 file of the book and grab the text if you need it so you can play it through the computer. This is my usual method since I mainly listen at work. I don’t need the text most of the time but it’s there.

With MP3s in hand you can transfer them over to an iPod like an album. Very easy and pretty cool.

Of course iTunes offers multiple ways of getting stories and audio files on the iPod. Personally I like KiwiTech for Classic books. Their reader is very good, easy on the eyes and you can get massive collections of stories for only $0.99. Classics2Go offers 56 titles, and their entire Sherlock Holmes collection was a mere $0.99. That’s pretty impressive.

There’s also programs like Audiobooks and Audiobook Player which hooks into Librivox so you can download titles directly. Again, very cool and only $0.99.

And if that doesn’t offer enough titles you can get an app like Free Books which will let you browse the Project Gutenburg library which has thousands of book that have gone into the public domain.

I’m enjoying it immensely and already have several titles lined up for next week. They may not be modern bestsellers, but they were bestsellers of their day…

And just another reason why I think my iPod is cool!