Monday, June 02, 2008

Free audiobooks & ebooks


I've been a fan of Manybooks.net for a long time and have read several of their free books on my Treo smartphones.
I was happy to discover the other day that they now have several titles available for free download in mp3 form, either as individual chapters or as all of the chapters in a single zip file.
Manybooks.net is the creating of Matthew McClintock for the benefit of the Internet community.
Here's how he explains it:

All of the eBooks from manybooks.net are free, however donations toward the maintenance of the site are welcome.

Many of the etexts are from the November, 2003 Project Gutenberg DVD, which contains the entire Project Gutenberg archives except for the Human Genome Project and audio eBooks, due to size limitations, and the Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks, due to copyright. As of July 2004 most current PG texts are available here, usually within the week of release. There are also public domain and creative commons works from other sources.

Zip archives are stored in the same directory structure as on the DVD, with Author, Title, and related information stored in a MySQL database. Pages are built with PHP and served using the Apache webserver. The server is a 1.66GHz Intel Core Duo Mac mini running Mac OS X 10.4.

eBooks are generated on demand using a variety of tools, and cached for future readers - which means that the first time anyone requests an eBook in a particular format it will take a bit longer to deliver, but the next time that eBook is requested it will be sent immediately.


That means Manybooks.net has nearly 21,000 titles - mostly in the public domain that can be downloaded in a variety of formats - pdf, ereader, Kindle, Ipod Notes, and on and on for visual reading and three varieties of audio: 64 bps mp3, 128 bps mp3 and ogg vorbis.
I just finished listening to the unabridged original version of H.G. Wells's "War of the Worlds," which is considerably more detailed than any of the theatrical adaptations I've seen.
I'm about to start on Mark Twain's "The Innocents Abroad."
Check Manybooks.net out. I think you'll find something worth reading/hearing.

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