LibGuides: Educators & Students with Learning Disabilities: Audio/Digital Books & Podcasts

Free Audiobooks & Podcasts

FREE Audiobooks & eBooks

Audiobooks are valuable and enjoyable for most readers, but for those who have reading difficulties hearing the text provides many benefits: they help with fluency, pronunciation, vocabulary, enhancing visual imager, and critical thinking skills. If the text can be viewed also, the benefits are multiplied.

Besides the books on CD, Playaways, and ebooks that we are familiar with through our usual vendors and bookstores, here are other resources for the school library that students, parents, and teachers value:

BookShare
Accessible Books and Periodicals for Readers with Print Disabilities. Approximately 90,000 titles including books, textbooks, periodicals, assistive technology tools. Free for all U.S. students with a qualifying disability.
Free Classic AudioBooks. Digital narration for the 21st Century
Classic titles!
Free eBooks Guides at University of Nebraska
Great resource for free ebooks for high school and college students.
Great Speeches Of The 20th Century on Audio Download
This collection represents some of the most well-known speeches of the 20th century, spanning the years 1908-1991. Each speech has been edited to include the most memorable and noteworthy segment. Every attempt has been made to include a variety of speakers in the political, historical, inspirational and topical categories. Great Speeches Of The 20th Century was designed to be used in research in schools, colleges, and universities, or simply as reference for those who have even a casual interest in historically important oration.
Kids LearnOutLoud
Kids Free Stuff Section from Learn Out Loud.
Learn Out Loud
Free & Fee. Scroll down to "Browse Free Audio & Video Titles by Category." Also FREE podcasts, such as Founding Fathers, Great Speeches, Philosophy readings.
LibriVox
"Audiobooks from the public domain. LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we releasea the audio files back on to the net for free. All our audio is in the public domain, so you may use it for whatever purpose you wish."
LoudLit.org
"Committed to delivering public domain literature paired with high quality audio performances. We pair together great literature and accompanying audio. Putting the text and audio together, readers can learn spelling, punctuation and paragraph structure by listening and reading masterpieces of the written word. Read and listen via your web browser or on your MP3 player"
Maria Lectrix
A "public domain audiobook podcast--for people with catholic tastes." Novels, religious books, essays, folk tales, humor, love, poetry, plays, science fiction, short stories, Church Fathers
Miette's Bedtime Story Podcast
Short stories can be listened to or downloaded. Search by author--wonderful selection of literature not always found on other sites. Some adult content. A blog format.
Project Gutenberg - Free Audio Books
Audiobook, human read, "The place where you can download over 30,000 free books to read on your PC, iPhone, Kindle, Sony Reader or other portable device."
The Audio Books Project - Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg makes audio eBooks available for some of the same great literature available in plain text. Our listings are divided into two categories: Human-read and computer-generated audio books. These files can be very large, so are not well suited for people using a modem or other low-speed connection.
The Founding Documents Podcast
Documents read by human voices. Very useful podcast archive!
Welcome to Lit2Go ETC
Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in MP3 format. You can download files to your ploayer and listen on the go or download and listen on your computer. From Florida's Educational Technology Clearinghouse.