eBooks & Audio eBooks - week 9, thing #22

I've looked at Project Gutenberg before, but I have never downloaded anything. Right now, until Aug. 4th, over 600,000 ebooks are free to download at the World eBook Fair. I went ahead and downloaded "Sense and Sensibility" and it's interesting to read the preliminary information printed at the head of the downloaded copy of the book. This would be a good resource for students to use to find copies of classics to print out and mark up, particularly for Honors and AP English classes. I don't particularly like to read the books in this format, but it is an incredible resource.

The link on the SLL2.0 page to the Best Places to Get Free Books is a useful link to have. I've put it in del.icio.us so I don't lose it and I can find it at school.

LibriVox is another great resource for books used at school. They have a lot of the classics that are read in English classes, so this would be a very useful site to put on the library webpage and encourage students to use.

I'm trying to provide audiobooks for checkout and/or download in the library. I recently received a grant from our local education foundation to purchase audiobooks and I think I will be spending it on some Playaway titles for now, as I explore the various other ways we could be providing audiobooks. I got a lot of information about ways to do this at one of the sessions at last year's CSLA Conference and at an Infopeople workshop, but I still don't have it worked out. I have paid for and downloaded some books for myself from iTunes to my iPod and it was easy. There are so many titles available there, but there is no easy way to pay for this from school, so again, I still have a lot to work out. I would like to take advantage of that equipment that all of the students are already carrying around, like MP3 players and now their iPhones! I'll keep working on it.

Only one more thing left to do.