This writer recently discovered that The Internet Archive, a web-portal that houses the archives of the entire Internet — from legacy copies of ageing websites to e-reader-ready copies of books that are no longer under copyright — also hosts a trove of audio-books. That’s right: books read out to you, available for free. Just download them to your smartphone and hit play on the go.
On the Archive, these files are available under various categories, a large number of them concerned with poetry. If you’re more interested in the classics, check out the Gutenberg and Librivox Collections.
In fact, these two collections have also teamed up to contribute to Librophile, another portal that’s big on audio-books. Unlike the Archive, Librophile also offers a set of audio-books that are available for a price. There are hundreds of classics to choose from, not to mention many works of non-fiction as well — from Sun Tzu’s Art of War to Alexander Hamilton’s The Federalist Papers . Librophile also has a cleaner interface that goes easy on the eyes if you’re looking for particular titles.
ThoughtAudioA third nugget in this short list is the aptly-named ThoughtAudio, which has a wonderful collection of philosophical works.
Like the Archive and Librophile, the books are all free but there’s a catch: ThoughtAudio has them divided into small chapters each, downloadable one at a time. This means two things: you can listen to them bit by bit, like having a snack, and pace yourself out, or you can pay $10 to be able to download entire audio-books in one go.
