Audio Books?

bfar

bfar

bfar

Soldato
Joined
14 Jul 2004
Posts
2,550
Anyone know where one can get some legal free (or cheap) Audiobooks? I'm after classics, you know, stuff well past its copyright. Cheers.
 
Most libraries have pretty extensive collections of audio books. Anything from Harry Potter to the classics. Sadly, it's an under utilised council service. Get a library card and help keep our libraries !!

I love my library card. can get any book as soon as it's out (on the library exchange scheme). Save loads of money as well.
 
many available via newsgroups; all sorts too.
very entertaining if you can't be bothered to actually read for yourself.
 
bfar said:
Anyone know where one can get some legal free (or cheap) Audiobooks? I'm after classics, you know, stuff well past its copyright. Cheers.
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Just to be clear about it, even classics aren't necessarily out of copyright. Copyright exists in both the book itself AND an individual sound recording. So if you take something like, oh, Shakespeare or Chaucer and record it for an audiobook, the copyright will have expired on the text, but almost certainly not on the recording.

Sound recordings in the UK will be protected for a minimum of 50 years from the year of recording, and if release was delayed, 50 years from year of release. So unless your audio book is either a recording in excess of 50 years old (unlikely) or has been put in the public domain (possible for some recordings, but unlikely for commercial products) it is still copyright protected.

So there's nothing to stop someone making their own recording of a copyright-expired book and either selling it or giving it away, just as there is nothing preventing you hiring an orchestra and recording Handel's Messiah ..... but it would still be illegal to copy someone else's recording unless the 50-year audio recording copyright has expired too.
 
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