≡ Category: Audio Books, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
On Bloomsday (June 16), BoingBoing featured a rare audio recording of James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake (mp3). It’s a bit intriguing to hear his voice and accent. Also, we came across another Joyce recording, where, this time, he’s reading Anna Livia Plurabelle, another section of the same novel. For kicks, you can catch an animated [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Every June 16 is Bloomsday, which commemorates James Joyce’s Ulysses (get free audio of the text here). In Dublin and around the world, celebrations usually include a reading of Joyce’s classic. Last year, in New York City, one high-profile event featured Stephen Colbert reading the part of Leopold Bloom, the character around which the sprawling novel [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Comedy | ≅ Leave a Comment
Not long ago, we featured David Sedaris reading “Of Mice and Men,” a comic bit from his newish book, When You are Engulfed in Flames. Now, we give you another funny (also live) reading from the same book. The story is called “Solution to Saturday’s Puzzle,” and you can get it as an mp3 here.
Related Content:
David [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books, e-books | ≅ 4 Comments
A couple of weeks ago, crime writer Seth Harwood wrote a very popular piece here - How I Sold My Book by Giving It Away. Now he’s back and telling us about the new challenge of writing in the digital age. Take it away Seth (and check out his new book JACK WAKES UP )…
The [...]
≡ Category: Apple, Audio Books, iPhone | ≅ 1 Comment
The iPhone just got a bit smarter. Thanks to this new, free app, you can listen to 1800 free audio books on your Apple device. The app lets you listen to public domain audio books from the great Librivox (whose works, read by volunteers, also appear in our Free Audio Books collection). The ad-supported software is straightforward [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books, Most Popular | ≅ 19 Comments
Today we’re featuring a piece by Seth Harwood, an innovative crime fiction writer who has used the tools of Web 2.0 to launch his writing career. Below, he gives you an inside look at how he went from podcasting his books to landing a book deal with Random House. If you want to learn more [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
From The Internet Archive: “Recorded here is the complete, original story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as penned by Fitzgerald in the early 1920s, published originally in Colliers and finally collected in the popular Tales of the Jazz Age.” You can download and listen to this Fitzgerald story here. Multiple formats are available. We’ve also added [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Seth Harwood is bringing crime writing into the new world of Web 2.0. Since 2006, Harwood has been podcasting his own crime fiction, including a book called Jack Wakes Up, which you can download (for free) via iTunes, RSS Feed, or MP3. (Random House will be releasing Jack Wakes Up in print next month for [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Business | ≅ Leave a Comment
The audio book version of Seth Godin’s latest book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, can be downloaded for free from Audible.com. Godin is the best-selling author of entrepreneurial business books and writes a popular blog on “marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.” In print, the book usually costs $13.57 and runs 160 [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books | ≅ 1 Comment
A quick fyi: We’ve spent some time beefing up our collection of Free Audio Books. The collection now features over 250 works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, all of which can be downloaded to your computer or mp3 player for free.
Among the new additions you’ll find some media from The New Yorker Magazine, including a series of mp3’s [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books, Sci Fi, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ 1 Comment
Sci-fi author Neil Gaiman has the right idea. After making his well-known novel American Gods freely available online last year, he has gone the extra mile again in releasing his new novel, The GraveYard Book. In brief, he has just kicked off a nine day book tour, and each day he’s reading a chapter that [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Literature, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
In a quick three minutes, you can watch the sometimes cocky author of The Corrections read from an essay on bird watching, courtesy of BigThink.com, where you can also find more videos with intellectual heft.
For more thoughtful video, also see our YouTube playlist and the related collection: Intelligent Life at YouTube: 70 Educational Video Collections.
Subscribe [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
I first posted this one during the dead of summer, so it seemed worth revisiting this now that we’re all a bit more focused ….
Over at the Internet Archive, you can find George Orwell’s classic, 1984, available as a free audio book. As you’ll see, the recording is professionally done. You can download the full [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books | ≅ 2 Comments
Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – It’s a major work of the Enlightenment, a book that shaped how we moderns write history (and, for that matter, how we aspire to write in the English language), and it’s now available as a free podcast thanks to Librivox. Or at least [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here’s a free audio version of Craphound, the first short story published by Cory Doctorow, who is otherwise known for his new book, Little Brother, and for his work on the very popular BoingBoing blog. (As an fyi, you can find an alternative reading of the same story here.)
Looking for more free downloads? Try the [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books | ≅ 41 Comments
The Alchemist has sold more than 65 million copies and been translated into 56 languages. A huge bestseller, in short. Here it is unabridged and free. I am not sure how long this offer will last. So I would grab it sooner than later — and while you’re at it, don’t forget to look through [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Literature | ≅ 5 Comments
Here’s a quick one while I am away on some unexpected business…
Over at the Internet Archive, you can find George Orwell’s classic, 1984, available as a free audio book. As you’ll see, the recording is professionally done. You can download the full zip file here. Or alternatively you can get the individual mp3 files, or [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books | ≅ 2 Comments
Horror/sci-fi fans, here you go… Scott Sigler’s new and very well-reviewed thriller, Infected, can be downloaded for free via podcast (iTunes - Feed - Web site). Or you can get it in hardback for $16.47, which I’m not discouraging you from doing.
With the links above, you can download more free books from Sigler. But, I [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Right in time for National Poetry Month (here in the US), Don from Classic Poetry Aloud (iTunes - Feed - Web Site) has highlighted mp3s of classic poems. You can download them for free. And we’ve also added them to our growing Free Audio Books Collection. Many thanks to Don for the great work.
Arnold, Matthew [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Today, we have a guest feature by Don from Classic Poetry Aloud (iTunes - Feed - Web Site), a place where you can find a great lineup of poetry podcasts. We welcome other guest contributors. So, if you’re interested, just email us. Take it away (and thanks) Don…
The internet has given poetry new scope and [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books | ≅ 2 Comments
This is a book that needs no introduction, but we will give it a short one anyway. Published in serial format between 1918 and 1920, James Joyce’s Ulysses was initially reviled by many and banned in the US and UK until the 1930s. Today, it’s widely considered a classic in modernist literature, and The Modern [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books | ≅ 2 Comments
Librivox is on a roll lately. Since December, the provider of free, public domain audiobooks has released a number of classic works on audio. Below, we’ve listed some of the highlights, which we’ve also included in our AudioBook Podcast Collection. (Here, you’ll also find free audiobooks by other providers.) For Librivox’s complete catalogue, click here.
2 [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here’s one for fans of horror, sci-fi and hardboiled fiction. Well Told Tales (iTunes - Feed - Web Site) brings you a series of “audio tales” from the pulp tradition. Each story runs somewhere between 15 and 35 minutes, and they’re produced with an eye towards quality. The makers of this podcast select good short [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books | ≅ 1 Comment
Let me serve up a quick few bits of audio for the holiday.
Let’s start with a free podcast of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Written in 1843, Dicken’s tale remains one of the most popular Christmas stories of all time. It gave us the indelible characters of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, and the Ghosts of [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books | ≅ 1 Comment
Joseph Conrad would be turning 150 years old, and to mark the occasion, The Guardian has taken a good look back at the Polish-born writer who wrote some of England’s finest novels, even though English was his third language. (Polish and French were his first two.) Conrad’s masterpiece, of course, is The Heart of Darkness [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
Podcasting is a new form of media distribution that’s done a good job of reviving old forms of media, particularly old radio shows. In the past, we’ve pointed you to several old radio broadcasts, including Orson Welles’ famous 1938 radio drama that led many Americans to hunker down in basements, desperately hoping to avoid an [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
Back in June, we highlighted the release of James Joyce’s Ulysses in free audiobook format. Ulysses stands as Joyce’s most important work, and for some, it’s most the important work published in the English language during the entire 20th century. Despite Ulysses‘ enormous stature, many readers still turn to Dubliners, a collection of 15 short [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
iTunes is serving up a freebie for audiobook fans. Written by Brad Meltzer, The Millionaires runs close to 15 hours. Publishers Weekly calls it “a fast-paced, fresh-scrubbed tale of financial adventure.” Download it here, and check out our larger collection of free audiobook podcasts. (Source: Boing Boing)
Related Content:
Newsweek’s piece on Jeff Bezos’ plans to reinvent [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books | ≅ 1 Comment
This is just a quick note to let you know that we “re-orged” the Audiobook Podcast Collection. The list, which had become a bit unwieldy, is now broken down by genre: Literature/Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry. And, within these categories, the texts are organized by the author’s name. Hopefully this all makes the collection easier to [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here’s a quick old time radio treat: Way back when, somewhere in the golden days, the NBC University Theater aired a dramatic radio broadcast of three Edgar Allan Poe stories, including the “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “Nosology.” Have a listen. (Source)
If vintage radio is your thing, then [...]
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