Audio Books: free downloadable mp3s freeonline

www.audiobooksforfree.com
You can download any book on this site for free but there are two problems. One is trivial but the other might cause you to look elsewhere for your audio books. Or else bite the bullet and pay money.

The trivial problem is that the site requires you to go through a signup procedure before you download. This will ambush you the first time you click to say that you accept the copyright terms, a necessary prerequisite for downloading anything.

But it's a very civilized procedure: all you have to do is invent a username for yourself and type in a password.

If you want to give them extra details, such as your true name, telephone number and email address and so forth, then they provide you with the opportunity to make such personal disclosures. But if you don't want to, hey, that's cool.

The more significant problem is that the free versions suffer from a low sound quality, in some cases 16 kb/sec and in other cases no more than 8 kb/s

The site bills 16 kb/s as "tolerable quality," which is the quality at which I downloaded something called WHITE COW. Having listened to this (a Chinese legend, I think) I personally agree that, yes, it is tolerable.

For ALICE IN WONDERLAND, however, the free download is at 8 kbs/sec, billed as "Bearable quality."

I decided to give it a shot.

Well ... how is the 8 kbs/sec stuff?

I downloaded the first of eleven files then, before downloading the others, sampled the quality of the first.

It takes you back to the world before the age of high fidelity, yes, like a radio not properly tuned to its station, with a bit of background hum. However, after listening for just a little while, I was no longer conscious of the hum. And I liked it well enough to go and download the remaining files.

I haven't read this book for years and years, and listening to it put a smile on my face. It's a classic for a reason.

Now, up to this point, everything is free. You can freely download stuff from this site and they boast, and they are true to their boast, that there are no audio ads on the stuff that they have for free download.

Their business model is user-friendly and gives anyone strapped for cash the opportunity to get stuff free.

If what you want is only for free at 8 kb/s, and if what is bearable to some people is not bearable to you, then you have the option of buying higher-quality downloads. The downloads I saw seemed to be priced from US $2 through to US $7 if you want ALICE IN WONDERLAND at 48 kbs/sec.

Everything, whether it's free or whether you are paying for it, is read by human beings, not machines, and the human beings know what they're doing.

Obviously if you want a lot of material the money starts to mount up if you're going to download a lot of material.

You do have the option of buying a "membership" for one year (starting from the day of payment) which gives you free access to audio which is of a better quality than the free stuff.

But if you're contemplating splashing out for a US $100 membership, then why not go the whole hog and buy the site's entire audio archive? If you choose to go the "hey, big spender!" route then for US $120 you can get (as of October 2006) the site's entire archive on a set of nine DVDs.

In mp3 format, so they won't play on your home CD.

You'd need to have a computer or an mp3 player, so this option would be no good for people like my parents, who don't have a single computer in the house, and whose audio equipment is primitive, limited as it is to a CD player, a radio tuner and a bunch of speakers, this gear being interconnected to a turntable for playing the old-fashioned vinyl records that, back when I was a kid, we used to call "LPs," the "LP" standing for "long playing."

My parents don't have anything computerized in the house, just this old timey "let's play music" stuff from some outfit called Bose.

For my parents, then, taking the private mp3 library route would not be an option.

If you think the nine-disk DVD collection might be for you, the www.audiobooksforfree.com site has a list of everything which is on the nine DVD set.

My own recommendation would be to try out the free stuff and see if you can live with the sound quality. If you can't, then my suggestion would be to think seriously about the nine-disk mp3 collection on DVD. One price, US $120, to anywhere in the world. This price covers the postage to wherever it is on planet Earth that you live.

A lot of people who are interested in audio books are either blind or visually disabled, so I was pleased to see that the site has, for people who are in that position, a simplified version of their signup form.

The layout of the form is very simple, as you can see if you click for it yourself, and the font is larger.

Being visually disabled myself, I'm dismayed at the way in which the average web designer flaunts his or her talent with complete disregard for visual ergonomics. Pretty much everyone on this planet will suffer visual deterioration if they live long enough, but web designers tend to be the sharp-eyed young, and they design for their own world, which is not the one that I live in.