Audio books: Spoken word entertainment

I have been a fan of podcasts for a little over 3 years now and follow roughly a dozen with some form of regularity. What I have discovered through listening to podcasts is that I am a fan of spoken word entertainment. The biggest advantage of entertainment you can listen to is that you can do something else while listening. Typically, I listen to my podcasts while commuting or while cleaning up at home.

Over time, a thirst for a greater variety of this type of entertainment began to grow. Eventually, I signed up for Audible, a subscription-based service that has over 40,000 titles of spoken word entertainment, including audio books.

Now, I love the Audible service and still maintain an account, but I found that the monthly subscriptions were adding up. Due to this fact, I began to seek a free alternative to the monthly subscription option.

The first service I discovered was Podiobooks, a free service that serves up audio books in podcast form. Podiobooks features a collection of books from both new, as well as published authors. What makes this service especially nice is that you can configure how often a book chapter is "sent" to your podcast client, anywhere from daily to monthly.

Then I discovered Project Gutenberg for audio books. According to Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg "is a volunteer effort to digitize, archive and distribute cultural works." LibriVox, AudioBooksForFree, and LiteralSystems have contributed to Project Gutenberg and also have their own collection of audio books.

On Audible you can find audio books, many of which can be found in print form at your local bookstores, and a great variety of other spoken word entertainment including radio dramas. Over at Podiobooks, you can find audio books from new and upcoming authors. At Project Gutenberg you will find books from the public domain.