Audio book downloads

[outback]

I'm looking for a website that has audio books to download. Being a tight ar....se Id like something for nothing, but I guess If I gotta pay I gotta.

Has anyone had any experience in this field, including upsides, downsides, pit falls and blunders?

[jackiew]

last time I looked my local library had heaps of audio books you can borrow for free.

one of the bookshops in melbourne has a deal where you buy the audio book and listen to it and then you give it back to them and they donate it to one of the charities for the blind and then they give you a voucher so you can claim your tax back so ....

you could have a listen of a new book AND allow a lot of people who can't read written print to enjoy the same book AND get a tax rebate at the end of the year.

[silentC]

The only free ones I've come across are machine-read and believe me, you don't want to go there.

[Zed]

try www.baen.com they do free downloads of online books (genreally sci-fi genre) ... they may have some audio available.....

[Daddles]

I love audio books - there's always one in the CD player of my car. I did find some on the net once but can't remember where unfortunately. I didn't mark the spot because they were only in mp3 and that don't work too good in my car. But if you do find a site, give a yell please.

I get all my audio books from the library. Free. Shocking range at my local but you can order them in from other libraries and they do rotate the books from library to library.

Can anyone guide me to software to create audio books? A mate and I want to produce some for sale on our writer's websites but the only technology we've found so far involves studio type stuff. Surely there's got to be something you use on your PC, but we just haven't found it yet.

Richard

[silentC]

they were only in mp3 and that don't work too good in my car

If you've got a CD burner in your PC you can convert the MP3s to Wav files and burn them to a CD.

Surely there's got to be something you use on your PC

Simplest way is to plug in a mic, and record to a wave file. You can convert Wav to a compressed format like MP3 and publish that.

[silentC]

Try this: http://www.share2.com/altomp3/

I use it a lot.

[Daddles]

Thanks for that Silent.

[Slavo]

The only free ones I've come across are machine-read and believe me, you don't want to go there.

I was aware that Microsoft Reader has a text to speach function and you can download a heap of free e-books. However I have just listened to it for the first time and the computer generated speach sounds like a really bad sci-fi sound effect (think Dr Who). You can author books in MS Reader format but given the quality of the speach I would look for alternatives.

[silentC]

Just as an aside, I worked with the guys who set up PhoneBank at Commonwealth Bank about 15 years ago. They had these synthesised voice machines called Dectalks that came from the US. You programmed them to 'talk' by typing in the words. Because of the built-in American pronounciation, it took some fairly imaginative spelling to get it to sound remotely like Australian speech.

That's the problem with the machine-read books. If you just feed in english text un-edited, a lot of the pronunciation is wrong.

[jackiew]

http://www.audiobooksforfree.com

link on one of the web sites related to a blindness charity.

[outback]

Thanks for the input.

My little local library does have a range of audio books, 90% on tape, and really ordinary range. It would take more mucking around than it was worth to convert them to CD, which is what I'm after.

ZED, Thanks, I'll check it out, the picture on the home page demands that at least.

Machine read stuff would probably send me to sleep, not good whilst driving I wouldn't think.

I checked out your link before posting JAckie, the quality of the free stuff is 8K, you can't really understand it.

I'll keep searching and see what happens.

Thanks again.