Get free audiobooks from Brilliance Audio
Posted 1 year, 8 months ago by AldereteI posted previously about BMW’s free audiobooks, a collection of four short stories, professionally read and available in MP3 format. I’ve only listened to one completely so far, and while the product placement was, shall we say, distinct, the story and the reader were both very good.
I recently stumbled across another source for high-quality spoken word fiction. THRILLER is a free podcast from Brilliance Audio, which offers five of the “thriller” short stories from a collection of 30, all by well-known, best-selling authors. Here the financial motive is more obvious; if you like the five freebies, you might buy the whole collection.
The first story I listened to was just so-so. It’s problem was that the short story is really a deleted excerpt from a book by the author. Mildly interesting if you’re reading his thriller novel series, but otherwise kind of a dud. The other two were much better, more successfully distancing themselves from the need to be familiar with other works.
You can download all five stories from the page listed, as MP3 files, or you can subscribe to the podcast, and have them automatically appear in iTunes (if you subscribe using the Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast… command).
The podcast approach is a little easier, but will put the stories in a different part of iTunes, instead of grouped with your other audiobooks. If you’re an organization freak like me, this will make you crazy, so I’d recommend downloading the MP3s individually, and dragging them into the iTunes Library window instead.
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August 25th, 2006 at 1:36 am
Thanks for posting this! I’m a fan of Lee Child and John Lescroart, two of the authors present among the freebies. Unfortunately, the pages are “not found” right now, so I hope they’ll fix their site so I can listen to them…
August 29th, 2006 at 9:57 am
@Kirk: by pages not found, do you mean the MP3 files are not there? I had no difficulty subscribing to the podcast, and that downloaded the five stories. So if the direct MP3 links are not working, perhaps the podcast will get them for you
September 1st, 2006 at 5:31 am
Pages not found, and the podcast isn’t working for me either…
September 3rd, 2006 at 3:20 pm
I just tested, and it’s happening to me, too (both links and podcast busted). It’s too bad that they are down; I’ll keep a lookout for updated links, etc…
November 19th, 2006 at 5:25 am
Hi, can I just ask a question. I have itunes version 7 and iPod video 30Gb and I have the harry potter audio cds and I want to put them onto audiobooks on my iPod. However, I can’t seem to do this as they are downloading under music and I cant seem to change them over. I also can’t change the format of the files.
November 19th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
@Tara: Everything I know about getting audiobooks to show up in the Audiobooks section, instead of under Music, is in the Aldo on Audiobooks FAQ, starting with the first item. There’s a fair amount of information to digest, so it bears reading a couple times through, while you’re able to try things out in iTunes.
But if you have a Mac (you don’t say), just try using Join Together or Audiobook Builder, and let them do all the work.
January 18th, 2007 at 6:02 am
Brilliance Audio has again started producing podcasts. They can be found here http://www.brillianceaudio.com/podcasts/ or in iTunes.