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Alternative audiobooks

The iTunes Music Store and Audible.com are excellent online resources for audiobooks—the latter carries more than 25,000 titles—but a big drawback is price. Audiobooks are not only more expensive than digital music albums; they also typically cost a few dollars more than their printed counterparts. But several projects are now bringing low-cost or free audiobooks to the Web.

Project Gutenberg —long famous for building a repository of free, public-domain e-books—has been quietly building an audiobook library as well. With more than 400 titles (mostly literary classics), it’s extensive enough to make for hours of browsing. Gutenberg carries only a handful of human-read books, however—most titles are read by computers.

Because Gutenberg uses public-domain texts, others can build from its existing work, which is what a site called LibriVox (librivox.blogsome.com) has done. LibriVox has started Podcasting audiobooks, one chapter at a time, from texts available on Project Gutenberg. Volunteers contribute all the audio, taking turns reading chapters and uploading them to the site. As LibriVox posts each chapter online, it also sends it out via a Podcast. LibriVox got its start recently with its first title, Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent.

Another low-cost alternative is Telltale Weekly, which sells about 100 human-read audiobooks at discount prices—for instance, Edgar Allan Poe’s story “ The Pit and the Pendulum ” costs a buck; Franz Kafka’s “ Metamorphosis” costs $4; Kate Chopin’s “ The Kiss” is a mere 25 cents; and James Joyce’s “Araby” short story, from Dubliners, is free. What’s more, all works are DRM-free, and available in MP3, AAC, and Ogg Vorbis formats.— Mathew Honan