LIBRIVOX AUDIO BOOKS

FREE BOOKS FOR YOUR EARS. Free | www.bookdesign.biz/librivox

Your humble reviewer has grown up with audiobooks, thanks to driving holidays around Australia as a child (looking out the window can only entertain for so long in this country), so we were eager to see how this free audio book app stood up against the paid options like Audible. First up, you’re asked to filter by language, as the app provides audiobooks in over 30 different tongues. After selecting however many languages you’d like, you’re then provided your choices. You can sort by Title, Author, Genre or New, or simply search for something you had in mind. You can mark any book as a ‘Favorite’ to check out later, and it’s super easy to either download the whole volume or chapter by chapter, or stream. The readers are all amateurs or hobbyists, so don’t expect to find Stephen Fry here. This user-contribution model is both good and bad, depending on how you roll. It’s good in the way that listening to these people feels less like listening to an audiobook and more like having your parents read you bedtime tales; however, it’s bad in that a lot of very England-based stories (such as Sherlock Holmes, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre or The Secret Garden) are read by Americans, which (engage Pompous Mode) just isn’t cricket! Also some books have individual chapters read by different people, which is good if you don’t like Chapter 1’s voice, but bad if you do! As this is a free service, non-invasive ads are sprinkled through your experience and are easily ignored — you’re here to listen, after all, not look. There’s a great range of fiction and non-fiction available here, but since you’ll only find things in the public domain, don’t go searching for raunchy fan-read editions of