Aldoblog

Barnes & Noble is giving away nine free audiobooks. Most of the selections are short stories, but Tom Sawyer is the full length novel. All are offered in MP3 format, which should be playable on any device. (With iTunes 8 you can change the media type to Audiobook to make tracks in any format behave like “true” audiobooks.)

Best-selling, critically acclaimed, and classic authors and stories are represented. The Louis L’Amour story is dramatized (think old time radio), the rest are performed by professional narrators. These are quality products, and a short but complete story in audio format is a great way to try audiobooks, if you’ve never given them a shot before.

Here’s the complete list of what’s available:

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
• Merrano of the Dry Country by Louis L’Amour
• “Ysrael,” an unabridged story from Drown by Junot Diaz
• “Truth or Dare,” an unabridged story from The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted by Elizabeth Berg
• “Fathers,” an unabridged story from The View From Castle Rock by Alice Munro
• “Great Day,” an unabridged story from Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut
• “Best New Horror” by Joe Hill, a story from the collection 20th Century Ghosts
• “Super Goat Man,” an unabridged story from Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem
• “The Babysitter’s Code,” from the collection Hardly Knew Her by Laura Lippman

The process for downloading them is a little painful, you have to add each one to your shopping cart, and then check out. The check out process requires you to fill in payment information, even though the purchase is free. (I imagine that’s the trade: you create an account with us, and we’ll give you something for free.) After you check out, you’ll receive an email with download instructions, which includes requiring you to install the Overdrive Media Console, a tool to download and manage your electronic purchases from B&N (Amazon has a similar tool), and then going back to the Barnes & Noble site to download the link files, and then opening the link files in Media Console to actually download the tracks. Then if you want them in iTunes, that’s another step. All in all, it’s nowhere near as easy as the iTunes Store, or Audible, or even Amazon. But did I mention the audiobooks are free?

The offer ends on May 16th (at 3am Eastern; call it the 15th for most people), so get there soon.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Audiobooks . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.