Audible.com has a
free 30 day trial offer for new customers! You get to download two free books (and listen to them on your computer, iPhone, iPad, mp3 player, or burn to CD) for free! If you have no intention of continuing your membership through the website, you can cancel anytime before the 30 days are over; obviously you get to keep the downloaded material too.
I have just taken advantage of this. I wouldn't recommend using your credits for picture books of course... but for those longer stories that you can't seem to find time for reading. This is an excellent opportunity to get ready for any summer road tripping you might do! We are planning on listening to a book that my husband really
wanted to read to his sons, but couldn't seem to find the time or energy after a long day at his physically demanding job. So it's the perfect thing to listen to in the car as a family:
Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers.
Our second free book was agony to choose; I mean you can get the ENTIRE Beatrix Potter collection for free! There are so many good ones out there. For me, it was a toss up between Swallows and Amazons, The Paddington Bear Collection, Just So Stories, The Princess and Curdie, Redwall, or the sorely tempting Thomas Sowell books. (Those however, aren't particularly family oriented so I thought it better to aim for road-reading... err... listening).
Just So Stories won! It'll be nice to hear the narrator do the animal noises much better than I could anyway...
So take advantage of this excellent offer! The great part is that as you are canceling your membership, they offer you deep discounts to stay active. I think the $7.50/month (one free book a month) for three months is an excellent deal... but ultimately, I just milked the system and got my free books and cancelled. But if you can afford it and can't seem to make time for longer reading with the kids... it would be a great program to subscribe to. Let me know which books YOU got for free!
Also there is LibriVox at librivox.org/ which is an organization that asks people of all kinds and inclinations to read books in the public domain so they can be provided for free as audio books. There are a few misses (my husband who is devoted to libriVox complains that some people volunteer who should not). I have found most of the Beatrix Potter books, as well as a few classics I can listen to while folding laundry or doing the dishes.
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