Update: The home page has changed and they know are showing 6 free books. You should see them near the top of the page. Audible Kids is offering free children’s audiobook downloads. Scroll down and click on “Free Downloads for Chidren’s Literacy” in the lower left-hand corner of the website. There are 9 books available including Rapunzel and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi as well as some titles for older kids. You do need to create a free account in order to download the free audiobooks, but you are not asked for your credit card number or mailing address. At our house we are listening to more and more audiobooks. Both of my boys think the read-aloud stories are just another type of music and they currently are listening to the Magic Tree House audiobooks. I’m adding Audible Kids to my list of mom resources.
Update: Want more free children’s audiobooks? Visit Storynory. Thanks goes to Homemaker Herofor the link! Do you know of any other sources of free downloadable audiobooks?
Two resources like are Story Online:http://www.storylineonline.net/It's sponsored by the Screen Actors Guild and the stories are all read by members with video. What’s neat is they also have links to related activities and a downloadable activity guide. For a little bit older age child. The stories are not downloadable though.Story Bee is another great site. They have lots of stories and they’re grouped by age.http://www.storybee.org/index.html
I second librivox. Anything by Kara Shallenberg is SUPERB. We have enjoyed her reading Heidi and More William for starters. Right now we are really enjoying Understood Betsey by Leigh somebody.Also the library. If I can’t find an audiobook I’m looking for at my library I interlibrary loan it.
Giddygoat – When you look at the very bottom of the Audible Kids website, you will see a blue & white book symbol in the left-hand corner that says "RIF" for Reading is Fundamental. You need to click on that symbol to get to the list of 9 free downaloads. Beside the symbol it says "Free Downloads for children's literacy". Does that help?
I feel like a bozo but I still can’t find the link…
Bri and Chris – Thanks for the additional resources you mentioned! I’m learning so much about all the possibilities out there for free audio books. I used to check out audio books from the library and listen to “books on tape” in the car during my long commute in Seattle. Now I’m having fun listing to audiobooks with my kids. It’s so cool that today’s technology allows most of us to be able to download them (and for FREE). You just have to know where to look (and you can’t be too picky).
Another possible source is your library’s website. I live in Davis County, UT and our website has an entire library of digital content including ebooks and audio books that can be downloaded. I am not sure that this is available in all areas, but is one worth checking!
cool, thanks! these titles are a little too old for my guys but i’m collecting bookmarks for rainyday/wintry day activities and these will be perfect then!
Ironically I had blogged about this just last week. There is a community named LibriVox that converts the public domain works at Project Gutenberg into human read audio. People read through chapters or entire stories then post them online for everyone to download and enjoy for free.You can see these works either posted on Project Gutenberg at: http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/1 or on the LibriVox.org website.
Thanks for letting me know, Amy. I changed the link to the homepage. You just have to scroll down to the bottom left-hand corner for the link to the free downloads. All the links are a little funky on this website, so I can’t link to anything directly. Hope you can find them easily now!
When I clicked the Free Audiobooks link, it said error occurred, and didn’t show the list of free books. I tried to do a search by price, to find all the free books, and it didn’t show them. Could you list all of the titles in your blog to make them easier to find?