Easy E-Reading

New technology, especially the internet, has made reading cheaper and easier. You no longer have to dig through the archives at your library to find classic titles, because new web sites have sprung up across the internet, featuring the texts and digital voice-recordings of old classics. Whether or not you’re aware of it, your Blackberry and IPod can actually be tools rather than distractions in this endeavor. Here’s how:




Librivox = Free Audio Books


Is talk radio destroying too many of your brain cells during your morning commute? Severely in need of a new way to tune out your co-worker’s gabbing? Check out Librivox.

Librivox features volunteer-produced public domain books. Public domain books are books with an expired copyright, so that they can be copied without any penalty. One can download the chapters to your MP3 player or IPOD (great, if you take the bus or subway). If you want to listen to your reading choice on your drive to work, Librivox gives you the option of downloading the file to your desktop so that you can burn a music CD. Just pop the CD into your car’s player on the way to work and your commute will be transformed.

How good can a volunteer generated recording be? Librovox has a pretty good quality control system to minimize well-intentioned but terrible volunteers. They only let a starting volunteer do one chapter on a first go. Thus, you might have one over-excited, squeaky sci-fi freak reading a middle chapter of The War of the Worlds, but never for much longer than that. The listening experience on the whole is quality.

Blackberry or Mobile + Daily Lit = Books Delivered to Your Inbox

Get chapters of public domain books sent to your email for free. The guys at DailyLit realized that the only thing the lot of us do more consistently than read the paper is read email, so they coded in a few books into a website, showed the site to friends, and wala! DailyLit was born.