The Archive

I've talked before about podcasting in the classroom, so you know that I'm a fan of recording information for my classes to hear later. Podcasts can work beautifully sharing lectures or Q&A sessions with students.

Once thing I also use podcasting for is when my students are reading a novel in class together. I have some students who may not be reading as quickly as the others and students who are absent for whatever reason, so it can be a real challenge to read a novel together as a class. In the past, I've created podcasts of me reading a book from cover to cover. But you have to be really careful about copyright laws on that one. I never post a fully read novel online, and I can't burn my podcast(s) onto CDs to distribute to students (which is sometimes a downer, because some of my students could really use that!). But we have to obey the laws. :)

There are other times when my class will be reading a very long novel and, quite frankly, I just don't have the time to record myself reading it entirely. (Do you know how exhausting it is to read an entire classic novel aloud in a short period of time? Your throat gets reeealllly scratchy and sore...trust me!)
Luckily for me (and you!), I found this website that contains the recordings of hundreds of classic novels!

Archive is a completely free (and legal!) service. It has much more free material than I'm about to showcase in this blog post, so if you're in need of other free, online materials, hop on over there right now and check it out!

But this post will focus on Archive's free audio book library. There are several companies that contribute to Archive's audio book library, but I find two companies particularly helpful: LibriVox and Gutenberg.While the Gutenberg company mainly produces books with a "computer voice," LibriVox has a collection because random people have volunteered to read the books and allow LibriVox to use their voice.

Much like a podcast, users can download the file to their computer (to put on a mobile music-listening device) or listen to the file directly from the website by simply pressing the "play" button and turning up the sound on their computer's speakers!
Can you imagine how much time and throat-soreness this is going to save me?! I'm thrilled!! Because the books featured here are past their copyright date, it's completely legal for this site to be operating and for you to use it. It may take you a little while to get accustomed to the entire site's layout, so you may want to head straight over to the Archive's free audio book library, LibriVox's audio library, or Gutenberg's audio library and begin browsing from there!

If you're just anxious to hear how it sounds, click here to be taken to a reading of Wuthering Heights in the LibriVox archives!

On a side note, you can also get free access to the actual text of these open source materials. Check out all the available titles on their text archive!