Free Resources from the Net for (Special) Education

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

FREE online resources and downloadable programs for learners and their teachers.

Today, I’m looking at another incredible resource that benefits countless people around the world. I find it inspiring that such a high quality and valuable resource is produced and presented to the world by a community of dedicated volunteers.

LibriVox (online resource) The mission of the folks at LibriVox is the “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain”. The ultimate goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books. This has resulted in an extensive, and rapidly growing, collection of books that have been read aloud and recorded by volunteer readers.

The audio files are available for download from the LibriVox website. There are three format options for each selection–64kbps mp3, 128 kbps mp3 files, or ogg vorbis. There is a separate digital file for each chapter of a book. (In the case of Shakespeare’s plays, there is a separate file for each act; and it is noteworthy that at least some of the plays are presented by entire casts of readers.)

I downloaded and sampled several files at random. In every instance, the quality of both the reading and the recording was excellent.

The LibriVox website has been designed to make it easy to locate any work in the collection. There is a convenient search engine which lets you search by title, author, category, genre, status (complete, in-progress, etc.), language, and reader. You can browse the entire collection, which is listed alphabetically. Or, you can browse one of the four sub-sections of the catalogue: fiction; poetry; non-fiction; dramatic works.

If you wish to keep up with what is happening at LibriVox, there are several options for RSS subscription. Of course, LibriVox would also welcome your contribution if you were to volunteer.