I’ve recently discovered a great source for free audio books: Librivox. Librivox is a community of people who record their readings of public-domain books for others to listen to.
From their website:
LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free
Their short science fiction collections caught my ear immediately. I’ve only gone through the first two collections at this point. There are some really good stories in there.
The quality varies from contributor to contributor, since these are amateur recordings, but most of them are of acceptable quality. Only once did I skip a story due to a terribly irritating voice, but a couple of other contributors’ voices sound not far from professional quality readings. There are also sometimes technical issues with the recordings themselves (i.e. hissing, minor background noises, etc.), but they are often easily fixed with a graphic equalizer or just ignored when the story is engrossing.
Definitely check out Librivox if you’re a fan of audio books.
The Amazing World of Don Dueck 