Week 9, #22

Free books a librarian’s dream!   Free books are wonderful whether they are physical books or e-books.   E-books are another way to get kids to read and or listen to books.  I often recommend audio books to special education students but I require them to have the book in front of them as they listen.   Finding free sources of audio and ebooks is wonderful.  FriedBeef’s Tech is a website that touts itself as the ultimate guide to the best places to get free ebooks.  So many of the books in the public domain are now available as PDF files and can even be read on my iPhone with a free application called “Stanza.”  I enjoyed exploring the site LibriVox  because it has both a listening and ebook catalog.  As a birthday gift a few years ago my son gave me a year’s subscription to Audible.com.  Since then I have won a grant from Donor’s Choose and I got 2 iPods for my library that I allow students to check out loaded with audio books.  Most of the books I have are in the public domain so it is easy to find ebooks that go with the audio books.  Students love using technology in this way and it makes reading fun even for the most reluctant readers.  I love audio books and ebooks.