I saw a site a while back that was about organizing a community effort to record books on tape, and thus offer a library of audio books for all, free of charge. The other day I was looking for it and I couldn't remember what it was called, so here's a sticky note for your monitor. The site is LibriVox (ie. "free speech") and is an effort to record texts in the public domain, taken for instance from Project Gutenberg.

Now you may be wondering why anyone would listen to recordings of text instead of just, you know, reading it. Well, lately I'm satisfied that I have a sufficient amount of reading to do for school and so I don't feel an urge to do more reading on the side. So this way I get the same benefit of the text, just without the arduous task of turning pages ;) Of course, other consideration enter into this, you don't have to sit up to read, you can even 'read' in the dark, falling asleep (which I'm testing as a new cure for insomnia). Equally, reading on the road is entirely possible, both walking and biking (which again I intend to test in the near future). It's a nice change from listening to music on the mp3 player, which tends to get dull after a certain period of time.

Finally, audio books are easy to come by if you can get them online. Dead trees have to be loaned, ordered or purchased first.