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QUITE OFTEN I FIND MYSELF in situations where I have to wait for someone or something for a few minutes or even up to hours. For a long time I have been a great fan of audiobooks to fill this spot in my life with both education and fiction. What made me a bit upset though was that the aggressive pricing on audiobooks, sometimes even higher then the printed edition. This have defenetly stoped me from buying alot of books which I wanted to own as digital editions. If pricing would be lower, I would buy more. As simple as that.
SO WHAT TO DO before the market is on the same track as me and set the prices on new books in a way where I feel that I want to contribute? Free stuff!
Librivox is a project where books which are no longer under copyright is digitalized into audiobooks by people for free. Just about anyone can pick up a book, read it in front of a mic and get it into the archive. Of course, this can not be done with new books which are still under copyright but there is so many classical writings which are not so it can actually be an alternative for quite some time.
WHEN I BOUGHT MY iPHONE I was really looking forwad to find a service where I could get audiobooks with a subscription-plan or perhaps with a solution using ads just as Spotify did with music. What I found was a small application called ‘Audiobooks’ by Travelling Classics. This was an interface to Librivox-readings which could be streamed to the iPhone and I was thrilled. If streaming is not you cup of tea there is also a version of the same app where you download the files and can listen to them offline. For all travellers and jetsetters this is a great opportunity to not having to stream data while abroad which can be costly.
THE INTERFACE of the app is not really good looking, it is instead nearly as simple as an interface can be just before it seem to lack something. But as the reason of the app is to listen to audiobooks, not to sit and watch the UI the problem disapear almost instantly.
AS AN EVEN GREATER BONUS on top of all this, the app is free.
