I measure how far behind I am in my reading of trade journals in inches and often feet. So other pleasure reading, fiction and other subjects, has taken a back burner for quite some time now, years in fact. I try to get caught up when I’m away from home and computer access is limited. Riding as a passenger in a vehicle is one of my favorite times to read through inches of backlogged journals.

Recently all this has changed. Over the last month or two I’ve gotten some seriously good books polished off, both fiction and historical. They cost me no additional amount of my precious time that I can rarely afford to give up. While driving or doing other solitary chores I can actually enjoy a good book. You can too!

You may have heard of Project Gutenberg where volunteers take books that the copyrights are no longer in effect and make them freely available for people to download from the web. True, they’re mostly older books, but there are many well-known classics available, think back to all those college and high school English classes.

The best part is that Librivox is a web site where volunteers take these Gutenberg books and read them to create MP3 audio books. The quality varies and each file has a redundantly annoying introduction but hey, they’re free, you can do anything you want with them, even play them for a public audience. You can play them on your computer or MP3 player or burn them to and audio CD or DVD. Some books are read by a single volunteer while others are broken up by chapter or groups of chapters across multiple readers. Others are even broken up by readers for each character. The quality varies with some being professional quality and some not so. Anyone can volunteer and Librivox will not exclude someone because of quality. Additionally, there are some more modern books that the copyright owner has made available. Plus there are plenty of publicly available documents like the Constitution, The Bill of Rights, even the report of the 9/11 commission. Books often have links to a Wiki on the subject and to the Gutenberg page so you can get the text too.

And if Librivox doesn’t offer enough for you, stay at home and surf into your local libraries. Then download their audio books, all you need is a library card to check them out. They use OverDrive as their checkout clearinghouse. You don’t have to check them back in, they automatically expire in a week, at least for play on your computer. If you’ve already downloaded them to your MP3 or WMA player or to an audio CD or DVD you can keep playing them on equipment that doesn’t use DRM.