Audio Books

We love listening to audio books! We never take a long car trip without them, and frequently we even listen when we are bopping about town doing our errands. We listen at night before bed. We listen together and we listen alone. We can’t get enough!

I hope this post will be informative and helpful. Keep reading for links to some of the best sources for audio books and a list of some of our all-time favorites.

Where we get our Audio Books

We don’t buy books on tape or CD very often, as we have found MP3 to be cheaper, generally. When we do buy books on tape, we often purchase from Library and Ed. This wholesale site is only for teachers, libraries and homeschoolers, so you will have to fill out an online form stating that you fall into that category before you can even see their catalog.

If you are eligible to purchase from them you should definitely check out their catalog. Their prices cannot be beat! They have lots of the Focus on the Family Radio Theater, which are some of our favorites. They also have a lot of Your Story Hour CDs. We don’t listen to Adventures in Odyssey, but they sell those, too.

Audible.com is the most comprehensive source I’ve found for MP3 downloads. We get most of our audio books there. New members can often get a 3 month membership for $7.95 a month, giving them one book per month. At times, we have paid $22 monthly for 2 audio books a month, other times we have paid an annual fee of about $10 to get 30% off of all books and access to sales. We also request audio books from the grandparents for birthdays and Christmas. If they join Audible, they can purchase books with their credits and give them as gifts.

Our children have an inexpensive MP3 player with speakers, and sometimes we burn the books to CD.

We also use Librivox for free audio downloads. The books on Librivox are all in the Public Domain, and they are read by volunteers. They usually don’t have the same quality of narration that you find on Audible, but they have many classics that I need for school. We enjoy using these books a lot, but the site is virtually impossible for my younger kids to navigate. It takes forever to search for books, and there is nothing interesting to look at amidst all the words. Many titles are not appropriate for kids, either.

That’s why I built My Audio School, so that I could find the gems amidst the rocks and put them in a child-safe, user friendly format that my kids can use for their school books and pleasure listening. Now that we have My Audio School, we are using audio books almost daily.

I hope you’ll check out the links to great audio books on My Audio School. You can stream lots of great books right on the site, including Edith Nesbit’s Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare for Children or Treasure Island.

Librivox books are very easy to download: if you have an iTunes account you can just click “save in iTunes” and it automatically imports the book. When you are ready to listen, click on the black triangle beside the title and “get” each chapter file. If you don’t have iTunes, you can still easily download books to your Mp3 player…each player has its own instructions, so check your manual. We find this to be easy and it takes just a minute. We also frequently stream books from the computer…the kids play quietly on the floor or sit on the couch while listening. I often open one window and stream an audio book, then minimize it so I can listen while I am working on other things on the computer.

You can also get two free audio recordings daily at the new site Blue Behemoth. Usually they offer sermon audio for adults, but frequently they offer one or two episodes of their fantastic Jonathan Park creation science radio drama for kids. Check back daily to see the current available free downloads. Go to the Jonathan Park website to learn more about this incredible series and to listen to this week’s episode for free. You can purchase this series through Vision Forum. If you are willing to buy it on cassette tape, the price is very reasonable.

I can’t say enough about Jonathan Park. My kids listen to the series over and over, and they have learned to think on a very deep level about creation science through the tapes. And while you are on the Vision Forum site, check out their fantastic audio version of Pilgrim’s Progess.

I haven’t tried Simply Audiobooks yet, but I am intrigued by their site-concept. They have a rental program, similar to what Netflix has for movies. You pay a monthly rental fee and get your audio books in the mail, then send them back when you are done. Still, the fee is rather high, and there is so much on My Audio School now that I don’t know if we will ever find a need for Simply Audiobooks. I guess when I am purchasing audio I prefer Audible so that we can keep the books. As of this writing, if you join Audible it costs about the same for one purchased audiobook as Simply Audio books charges for one month of rental (allowing one rental download per month). I have books I bought 4 years ago for my oldest son that my younger ones are listening to now. I’d always rather own than rent.

I use TalkShoe when I want to record something short for my children in my own voice. A book like Arnold Lobel’s Days With Frog and Toad is easily and simply recorded using nothing more than your computer and a telephone. Once you’ve made the recording, kids can stream the audio live from the computer or you can burn it to a CD or download to an MP3 player.

Some All-time Favorites
It is hard to make this list, as it could go on and on! We love ALL the Focus on the Family Radio Theater productions, especially:
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
Les Miserables
At the Back of the North Wind
A Christmas Carol

We have dozens of recordings from Audible. Here are a few the kids have loved:
Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare
Paddington
G. A. Henty’s In the Reign of Terror
James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small series (we love them all)
Cricket in Times Square
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Little Men
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (dramatized versions)

If you liked this post, please look for more posts in the Home Library Builders series. You might also enjoy the podcast The Homeschooler’s Library, which can be downloaded or streamed from the purple widget player in the sidebar of this blog.

Philippians 4:8 “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”